Janine: An ode to a young mother
Or how we sometimes write people our of our histories because of trauma
(This post may be triggering to anyone who has been impacted by suicide or has or is struggling with post partum depression. If you ARE struggling at the moment please reach out to your GP, family/friends right away. There is always support there even if it feels as if there isn’t).
On January 3rd 1988, my stepmum left the house we lived in in Woolwich (I recently looked it up on Streetmap and it hasn’t changed at all- still covered in ugly, grey pebble dash), and walked to a nearby council block. She carried my 6 month old sister Frances in her arms. She went up to one of the top floors, balanced on a window ledge for some time (witnesses said she hesitated for about twenty minutes) and jumped. Both my sister and Janine died instantly. Or perhaps my sister survived a few minutes. The story is not entirely clear as we never talked about it.
I had lived with my stepmum and dad for several years, but also moved back and forth to my mother’s house in south London. After it happened I went back to Dads and experienced the aftermath of the evaporation of our family unit. All of Janine’s things. My sister’s clothes hung off of the radiators, stiff and hard because they’d been left to dry too long. The white plastic bin was overflowing with soiled nappies. A handmade bear in the cot and a piece of sheepskin that she slept on.
My mother and I went over and shoved everything into bin bags. Mum very much felt that we needed to get rid of the evidence of these people as quickly as possible. That the more quickly we got rid of the stuff, the more quickly we could forget it had happened. Years later I have a couple of toys and photos but not much more. There is a jumper that my dad always wore and I have it in a Tesco carrier bag along with the death certificates and a few loose photos. In the photos Janine looks tense as she holds onto a newborn Frances. I remember after the birth that there was some dissonance between how I expected her to be versus the reality. She’d always wanted to be a mother to her own biological child. I now think it was the circumstances and her own trauma that meant it was a dangerous idea.
That there were so many different factors that put her at risk.
She’d always suffered with her own mental health. She was far from home (in South Africa) and things no doubt felt alien in Woolwich. She was serious and political and now I think considered too many variables. She thought deeply about everything to an extent that wasn’t helpful. This can happen as a parent anyway. Overthinking. Trying to control too many outcomes. If you are in a new culture, in a country where it rains 60% of the time, the sky often a greyish wash of cloud. I often think it was being alone too long.
We will never really know what happened.
The day after she died, I found an unopened Christmas present that I’d given her and cried. I didn’t cry very much however. I did other things. I had nightmares where I saw stick figures falling from great heights. I ran in my pyjamas out of the house, didn’t in fact stop running, until I was two miles away, then Janine’s brother, Anton, arrived and helped me up from where I was lying curled into a ball. My aunt came and stayed with us, and I experienced a nose bleed that went on for 24 hours. I sat with a bucket crouched in the front room whilst it bled out. It felt like some sort of cosmic event. Like the house was trying to kill us all.
I became obsessed with this feeling that we were all supposed to die. That there was little point in carrying on.
A few months later I myself attempted suicide. This was a foolish move as wasn’t driven by depression or psychosis (as I suspect Janine’s was). I did this purely to get attention. I took two bottles of paracetamol. I’ve written about this experience before because I wanted to point out that there are times when suicide is not actually thought about in any depth and just happens in a moment of panic. I knew in those moments that I didn't want to be in that house. That the situation was intolerable. I also felt alone. Dad took me to hospital, I had my stomach pumped and there was no subsequent discussion of why these things were happening or how we were going to survive. No therapists. No support. It was simply about going back to the same place, the same situation, and trying to survive again.
I was 14.
For many many years I never spoke about Janine. Her last act had erased all of the time before. The fact that she’d taught me about periods. She made me healthy food. She thought a lot about what would be good for me growing up, and came to the conclusion that I needed stability and a strong hand. She could be strict at times. Sometimes unreasonable (probably because she was suffering and that need to control which was fierce). She did a lot of therapy for things that happened in her childhood. She was a graceful and peaceful person. She was dedicated to changing the world and often went to protests. She was a feminist. She taught me to understand my own body. Sometimes she was embarrassing, as a teenager I remember feeling that a bit because she was so damn serious in her view of the world. She was actually right about everything and the way things have turned out.
She was 33 when she died.
I don’t talk much about my sister. I don’t talk about her because I didn’t actually get to know her. I have even fewer memories of Frances because at the time I was living with my mum. I know she had big blue eyes. She smiled a lot. I have two sisters who survived and I sometimes look at them and imagine what she’d be like if she was alive right now. I imagine a girl with strong political beliefs, one who doesn’t suffer fools, one who was going to do something meaningful with her life just like her mother had taught her.
As I get older I feel more of a need to talk about Janine. As my memory gets more foggy I struggle to unearth memories. A smile. A particular mauve jumper made from ribbons and wool. Her love of David Bowie. I thought she was going to have twins so bought her a book about that before Frances was born.
When Frances arrived I was a preoccupied teenager with my first boyfriend. I was interested in lip gloss. I liked smoking Silk Cut. I had already started going to nightclubs. I wasn’t around much.
Janine’s mental health went downhill quickly. She became convinced that in some way she’d damaged Frances. She refused to get her vaccinated. She overthought everything. She stopped sleeping and said things that didn’t make any sense. My dad worked in a university and his job was stressful. He left her alone each day.
As a mum to two kids I know how difficult new motherhood can be. I know the heart in the chest pounding. The worry. The analysing of absolutely every single detail. I can see Janine pacing. I can see the grey sky. I can see the loneliness. The days with no respite. The lack of rest. The inability to control any aspect of the whole thing.
All that family long gone. I sense some sort of resolution that I haven’t been part of yet.
Janine Scoltz. She isn’t on Google. She existed in a time before the internet. She tanned easily and had an infectious laugh. She is more than the sum of what she did.