The Lemon

Day 1242.

It’s Shrove Tuesday. It’s the day before the beginning of lent.

Every Christian nation has a sweet dish they consume, in tradition, to use up all the fat and leavening in the house, before the restrictions of lent commence.

In Britain it is pancakes, the crepes sort.

This sets the Brits into a frenzy of tossing pancakes from the pan to turn them. There are pancake tossing races, there are pancakes accidentally stuck to ceilings, landing on dogs, landing on Grannies in kitchens everywhere. Chefs share their recipes on morning TV and it is referred to in soap operas. In short, it’s a thing, although most people, I suspect have no clue of it’s religious origins.

Pancake day has always been important to Adam and so it became a big thing in our family and we would always enjoy pancakes together today.

Although others have been added over time, the traditional topping is lemon and sugar.

Facebook reminds me that on this day back in 2012, newly living in LA, I posted a photo of a lemon on our tree.

The wonders of an English girl picking a lemon from her own tree for pancake day, was not the primary motive for my post. It was the first time I had invoked the ‘tough love’ we are all encouraged to practice when our child is using drugs.

I had thrown Luke out of the house after relapsing, and without his phone, he had set off for a chosen life of freedom to take drugs.

I was a fucking wreck as I set off into my own wilderness of torture.

I had no way of reaching him. I was terrified.

I posted the photo for Luke. I posted it to show him what he was missing. To show him that he was missing the familiar and fond family tradition of Adam making scores of pancakes and tossing them high from the pan and all the high jinx and laughter that accompanied it, in the hope he would change and return.

Yes, I’m not sure I ever practiced tough love for the right reasons. It was never done to protect us. It was done to shock him into stopping the drugs.

It was torture for me.

Every hour was torture. Much like this is, now, for me.

Luke would never last long away.

One of my biggest PTSD moments, is the moment, years later, when I switched from that tactic. When I came to the realization that my choices were:

Drugs and no relationship with Luke

or

Drugs and a relationship with Luke.

I chose the latter. I chose to keep a relationship with Luke so that if he ran into trouble, if he should come to me and say “Mum, I fucked up, I need help”, the door would not only be open but it would be close at hand.

I have screamed and cried often over that decision.

I have regretted it.

I have claimed it was the moment that I killed my son, standing right there, yards from where I sit now.

But the Facebook group GRASP shows me that either way, ‘tough love’ or not, people couldn’t save their kids.

It’s ghastly. It’s torture.

And every shrove Tuesday Facebook reminds me with that image of that fucking lemon, of the time I threw him out and how my motives were all wrong and how I fucked it all up

….and now he’s dead.