24 hours some years ago

Wednesday morning at five o' clock, I drag myself out of the usual heavy sleep I am on anti-depressant. Poor wife has been up since I don’t know what time. She brings me a cup of tea. I start doing battle with the myriad tasks for the day that my head is swimming in, after about 15 minutes plus a shit and a shave I am practically awake.

I get dressed and surface. Child A is already downstairs, most days she is quite good at getting up. I come down A. is crying. A. is crying practically every morning when I come downstairs and this has been going on for about three months.

If she is not crying she will be by the time she is putting her shoes on. If she manages to gather herself together to start the walk or drive to school she will at some point break down again before she goes in.

This is having a dreadful effect on all three of us now. Although this last bout is by far the worst, we have been up and down with this for some years.

Wednesday morning with Monday and Tuesday behind us, we give up again. Mostly due to the fact that Child A. has been complaining of a sore throat for the past 24 hours but I am afraid to say Child A. has so many aches and pains we don’t really know where we are with them.

I look down her throat and it definitely looks sore. Wife takes the dog out. I go back upstairs and lay on the bed trying to gather my thoughts again. Child A. comes up she says she needs a cuddle. We talk. We talk about life being hard work and we talk about things that we have come through as a family over the past three years openly.

We watched granddad waste away with Motor Neurone disease, which is one of the most distressing things a human being can witness disregarding how close in the family. I (dad) suffered quite a bad reaction in my grief.

Last year grandma had open-heart surgery we were not sure whether she would survive. We were advised to prepare for the worst due to the seriousness of the opp. and grandma’s age and so was grandma.

Child A.’s head teacher also went into hospital for heart surgery last year and Child A. was worried about him as well. The head was the man she saw most of apart from me (dad), since granddad faded to death. Child A. tells me how she sticks up for Child X. when Child Y. picks on Child X. because Child X. has a different accent. Child A. tells me that Child X. has seen Jesus coming down out of the sky and that Child X. pronounces ‘fire’ as ‘far’ which is what Child Y. makes Child X. say because she thinks it’s funny.

Child A. tells me that one or two children have said that she (Child A.) is weird and that our family is weird. Child A. Allows herself a little chuckle when I (dad) refer to the identified culprit of a bullying incident at another setting as, “that horrible little cow” who incidentally Child A. has since faced up to but has gone a bit wobbly about again.

We talked about grandma moving house and how it was mega stressful because of the lawyers seeming to want the whole business to take as long as possible, who in fact lost grandma her first choice which after all may have been a blessing in disguise but we didn’t know at the time.

We talked about Peter and Benjamin dying and how well Child A. nursed them. Child A. told me about how “her friend” Child Z. shut her in a dark room after Child A. disclosed to her that she didn’t like the dark at a sleepover….. and how she hates being cute and small as well…. and how she used to hate Child Z. picking her up all the time at school…. and how Child Z now tells Child A. about her mum and dad splitting up and her aunt dying and how this makes Child A. feel really upset.

A. told me that it was all her fault that, mum and dad and her teachers and her friends are all fed up with her crying all the time but she just can’t help it. I left A. with her mum who is really struggling at work. The council is looking to save more money and her part time job our only income is on the line.

I set off to the place where I am supported to work a decent few hours a month. I had promised to help to walk children to a local church. I come home pack my stuff into the old car, drums, sound system, art-work, for delivery of my final of 8 x ￡50 sessions where we turned the school hall into a museum for the parents to visit.

The pay will break down to way less than the minimum wage! But I am an artist so I have to accept this level of earning for being a drain on the system.

I get home at 5.30 wife/mother/breadwinner/carer has cooked shepherd’s pie but she says, “I have not managed to do any work at all.” Child A. eats at the table with us, fairly unusual, but she can't manage to go to Brownies this evening where we are engaged in a bit of confidence work since another bullying disclosure. I go off to the local Labour Party meeting I get home about 9.30

Child A. is asleep. I open the wine and pour wife/mother/breadwinner/carer a glass of dandelion and burdock and stay up too late. I am a bit more than my usual dead head this morning. I have to be careful we can manage one of these mornings a week Saturday or Sunday but definitely not Thursday.

My mind isn’t one that stops very easily but if I don’t keep it busy I am my own worst enemy, wife is pretty much the same as well. I come down the stairs this morning and A. is starting to not want to leave the house again. I try everything and all the usual tactics to no avail. Wife comes back in from the car at my asking as she was trying to set off to work. I can no longer deal with A,’ sadness. A.’ class mates, know that A. has a bit of a vomiting phobia for some reason. She told me this morning that “a couple of her friends said that she would vomit if she didn’t stop coughing.” I don’t want to put my daughter through this kind of school life. A.’s mum coaxes her to school and meets the deputy head.

Child A.'s mum will be late for her meeting again. Wife rings me from the car outside the school she is crying she tells me that she must go to work to bread-win now. I say why don’t you pop home for a cuppa? I know that she cannot do that. I sit down and write it all down again! Feeling like a bag of shyte again!

THE LATEST NEWS. Next week we have an appointment with an expert. Wife said he sounded like a really, nice man on the phone. He feels sure that he can help us. Our school nurse recommended that we get in touch with him as we have found out that a child can be waiting more than 40 weeks for help if we rely on the system called “Every Child Matters” to kick in!

The man is a child psychologist and we are going to pay him privately. His fee for one hour is three times what I have been getting paid per day on my last project, which was delivering art workshops for twelve needy children! I don’t mind that but what if my daughter needs several sessions? How can I pay? The other thing that the very nice man said to wife is that nine times out of ten children that he treats in his practice for the type of things that A. is going through have formed as a result of bullying.

So there we go, as a result, of some shit-head behaviour nine out of ten mental anxiety problems in children, force ordinary people to have to find large sums of money beyond what is reasonable. In order to pay for the collateral damage caused by a system that is clearly failing too many children as well as one in four adults.

College homework this week is emotional resilience. I have no idea what “Emotional Resilience” is. I have spent many hours trying to find out. Finally, people laugh at me when I point out that a clown on a BBC children’s TV programe makes fun of peoples accents. People seem to think that if children laugh it must be harmless. He probably gets paid more than a child psychologist. I think I am beginning to see how it works?