My Brave Sister Helen

This work is dedicated to my brave sister Helen.

Her story needs to be told.
It needs to be told because she like many others, was brought up by narcissists. Her terrible childhood trauma meant she didn’t stand a chance at life. The impact that it had on her was profound and ultimately caused her death at 47.
I am also writing it for me to add more clarity to what happened and to maybe, help others to make sense of life with narcissists and the profound and damaging impact that has.
Being the oldest in a family of 6 siblings, and 16 years old when she was born I watched her life unfold from day one. I could see the inevitable happening right before my eyes and was powerless to help.
No child could survive the abject neglect, both physical in terms of even having a meal, to the emotional neglect she suffered. The abuse from my mother was constant. Sometime overt, with rants, tirades of accusations, blaming and incoherent nonsense but mostly ambient which required the best egg shell walking humanly possible to protect oneself from severe emotional harm and abuse.
My sister Debbie was on this journey with me. She too died young in 2020 aged 59 from the same cause- narcissist parents. You will never see that on any death certificate.
We attempted several times to tell the authorities what was happening. The ‘system’ allowed my mother who was clearly mentally unwell because she was sectioned many times, to the no longer in existence Winwick mental hospital, to look after two babies, Helen and my sister Barbara.
My mother was often catatonic and unable to look after herself let alone baby Helen who was left all day lying in a Moses basket. My grandmother Edith would visit and try her best but she was ill equipped to deal with a severely mentally ill daughter and spent a lot of time crying and pleading with Maureen. No sign of our father
My mother had an older brother who would visit and observed all the goings on. He was present when she was ‘sectioned’ once. He was of the opinion that all Maureen needed was ‘a bit of love’ and so, unaware of and lacking in understanding as to the severity of her mental state, was no use to her or the babies. It was me that accompanied Maureen in the ambulance as the adults bailed- as they say!
The doctors, starting with her GP, back when I was a child, gave her Valium and Mogadon and she took these most of her adult life including while being a ‘mother’ to six children and the two babies, Helen and Barbara with no husband or support.
When we were kids, my brother called her ‘Mogadon Maureen’ as a joke but it wasn’t funny.
She was in bed – a lot. In fact one of my earliest memories aged about 3 was of me and my siblings playing under the kitchen table while our mother, then aged around 25 was in bed! Another time when I was about 8 years old, I was hurt at school when I fell and banged my head. The teacher took me home. Maureen was in bed then too and we had to wake her up to get her to open the door. I was very embarrassed!
My violent and abusive father Tony, was physically absent for the babyhood of Helen. He was always emotionally absent.
His story is another sad one. The victim of an abusive mother – she liked to beat him in the bath naked, with a belt apparently. So he took that out on my mother with regular beatings usually after alcohol had been consumed but not always. Thankfully he never beat us physically, although he and my brother had drunken fights when my brother reached young adulthood the worst and most terrifying being then whisky glasses were thrown.
He and my mother were divorced when Helen was a baby. My mother – a devout catholic, used the having of babies as tools, a tool of entrapment in my case. I was born in May and she married in the September before, and, as baby cement in the case of Barbara and Helen.
Mother and Father soon remarried and it was back to business as usual between them with fights, violence, physical abuse, verbal abuse and more sectioning to Winwick Mental Hospital.
The mental health doctors – psychiatrists, were only interested in supplying pills and Social Services failed to look into the mental health of my mother and the home she provided for Helen despite me and Debbie visiting their offices on two occasions to tell them our worries and concerns . Debbie even suggested that she look after Barbara and Helen but they looked at us like we were mad.
I saw her life unfold from a distance, tried to help when I was allowed by ‘the authorities’ and by Helen herself. All the time I was verbally abused and used as the scapegoat by my narcissist mother who blamed me for everything wrong with her and her children’s lives.
Sometimes, I couldn’t take anymore of the crazy drunken phone calls from my mother. When I had my first baby I wanted to protect him from the madness. Soon after my son and daughter were born Helen became pregnant with a baby, father unknown. She gave birth to him aged 19, while in Winwick mental hospital.
Helen spent much of her life with the threat of being sectioned or actually in the Brooker Centre.
Before Helen died, she recorded a live stream on Facebook from the Brooker Center where she was sectioned in 2020 where she says,
‘I’ve not got long for this world’.
Was that a premonition?
Ultimately Helen’s story may help others and expose the failings in mental health education and systems which are supposed to help because in my experience they did nothing to help me, my mother or my siblings.
This is her story some of which, thanks to social media is in her own words. It shows the impact that childhood trauma, emotional abuse and neglect has on children.