Family for Sale by Jess McKay

Family For Sale

By Jessamy-Leigh McKay

Family for Sale Written and published by Jessamy-Leigh McKay. © Jessamy-Leigh McKay 2020 Images sourced on eBay Artwork created by Jessamy-Leigh McKay.

To my family; here’s to our constant fight for some normalcy in a life that hasn’t been kind to us, and to my sisters I hope this helps to fill some part of the void that has been missing for the last ten years.

Introduction Like all families, mine has had its ups and many, many downs.

Unfortunately, one of these downs in particular was my mother leaving in 2009 which affected the family in ways that we are still recovering from now.

My family has broken a part in the last 10 years since she walked out on us, as the oldest of four, with three younger sisters it was hard because I remembered our mum the best for the good memories that she gifted me with before her selďŹ sh illness took over and she was no longer able to look after us in the way she was supposed to do.

For a long time throughout my teenage years I resented her for leaving and for seemingly choosing her alcoholism over us, but it's only through the last few years and particularly my second year at university when I did a project on the effects of alcoholism that I was able to properly work through these feelings and realise that alcoholism is a horrible, selďŹ sh illness that ruins the lives of the alcoholic, as well as those around them.

One of the earliest memories that I remember was that my mum would always come with me and support me at my majorettes tournaments. I can’t remember exactly what happened to a ďŹ ne point because I was really young but she would often help me practice the baton twirling in the back garden, and she kept my medals that I received (even if they were only for third and, once, second place!) I think at this point she would have been proud of me because this is the after school club I kept going for the longest at. She always made sure my uniform was neat and clean, and made sure my hair was neat and presentable.

Other clubs that I joined were Brownies, Ballet, and Karate and she took me to all of them and even let me attend them even though I remember losing interest a few months in to them, especially Karate and Brownies as I remember attending these.

I remember my mum being really artsy, and I think she is deďŹ nitely where I developed my creative side from.

She was extremely talented when it came to Halloween costumes and fancy dress parties; I remember her making me a blue bird costume; the Phantom from Phantom of the Opera, a Christmas tree, and Angelina Ballerina who I was obsessed with when I was little.

I remember one Halloween where she made me into a witch and my sister into a pumpkin and the pumpkin costume was brilliant; it was plump and round and now that I look back I am in awe of it. We did have a photograph of these costumes but it has got lost over the years among other things.

One summer my mum taught me and my sisters how to build a miniature garden using a yellow and grey tray. We collected stones from the river, and twigs and leaves from the woods in order to replicate a small garden, using coffee lids we also built little ponds.

It was because of this that one summer I decided to dig a hole at the bottom of our garden to create a real pond, in hindsight we probably weren’t allowed to do this but luckily I didn’t get very far before I lost interest and now there is just a dent at the bottom of the garden.

I would often sit on the back of her armchair in the living room and spend hours doing her hair on a night.

I learnt to do french braids doing this, but would often sit just messing around with her hair and coming up with funny hairstyles to give her because she liked her hair being played with.

Growing up I always loved her long, mousy brown hair and used to be obsessed with how beautiful I thought she was- maybe looking back on it now it’s because my friend’s mums were a bit older and my mum was quite young but I was always in awe of how pretty she was. I loved playing with her hair and it’s one of the things I miss the most about her not being around.

I loved the walks we went on with Rusty, our dog. We used to take him down to the river and attach a washing line to his collar so he could go for a swim (but not run away!)

One time my friend Beth came with us and we found pennies in the river from where people had thrown them off to make wishes. In hindsight we probably stole everyone in the surrounding areas wishes, but we made around ÂŁ30 which we split evenly and spent on lots of sweets.

We also used to play hide and seek with Rusty in the long grass in the ďŹ eld, mum would hold him whilst we hid and then let him go to come and ďŹ nd us.

Another one of my best memories with my mum was when we used to walk to the shop on a night. We would always try and point out the different constellations that we could see, the main one I recognised being Orion's belt, which on my good days I still associate with her when I see it.

She supported my astronomy hobbies and bought me different books and even a telescope for christmas once- we couldn’t get it to work but looking back it's nice to think that she was always ready to support me and makes me wonder if she would support me now at this point in my life.

Mum was also really good at hosting birthday parties when we were younger and I remember her making different cakes, she made a hedgehog cake for my sisters birthday which was amazingly decorated, and a caterpillar cake for mine which at the time was cool that it was handmade. There was always mini sausages and sausage rolls as well as different sandwiches.

We had a high breakfast bar that my stepdad made for the kitchen and all the food would go on this and would cover it.

We only had a small house but she deďŹ nitely tried her best and went all out.

Another memory that I associate with my mum, and we did at one point have a photograph of but she must have taken it with her when she moved out- was that once I went to a birthday party at Brewster Bears Fun Factory and I came home with a giant helium balloon.

After a while we didn’t have room for it in the house so instead of popping it and upsetting me my mum came up with the idea of attaching a note to it with our address to see how far it would get once we set it free.

I can’t remember how far it got but we did get a letter from the RSPB bird sanctuary saying they had found it which I thought was brilliant at the time.

I asked my sister for some input for this one, and she said one of her best memories was the walks we would take to places like Castle Hill, Greenhead Park and Beaumont Park.

This got me thinking that I remember her taking me to ride my bike at Beaumont Park once and it was a pale green and pink bike that had unicorns on it, a white basket and pink frilly bits coming off the handles. I remember learning to ride it and coming off stabilizers at Beaumont Park and my mum helping teach me.

My Nanna once got me a duck keyring from her trip to Whitby that my mum helped me name Quackers. This is a memory that I wish I had pictures of because I loved this duck, I took his metal keyring off of him and at one point he was my bestest friend. He came to school with me, had his own clothes, his own school bag.

My mum would help me collect boxes which I would then make into a dollhouse for him made with cardboard furniture and other recyclable objects found around the house.

We even went to Reighton Sands once and I bought a two sheep keyrings, one was a sheep with a flower in its hair and one was a smaller baby sheep; of course this then became his wife and child because its plausible that a duck would have a sheep wife and child.

I lost Quackers after he got pooped on by my cat and the washing machine ruined him when we tried to save him (at this point he was so old and worn from years of playing) and unfortunately I have no photos of him or the houses I built for him- the only written evidence I have is on my year 6 leavers book both my teacher and a classmate wrote about him (my teacher loved him really he just pretended we drove him mad).

It is only now as I am starting to plan out my future and the life I am going to have with my partner of three years, as well as focus on rebuilding some of the relationships that have been disrupted in my family that I realise just how bad alcoholism affects the lives of those involved. I have consciously made the choice to not drink alcohol and haven’t since January 2018, just because I didn’t want to follow the path of my mum as I witnessed how badly she suffered and in the fallout, how badly we had all, already suffered.

I forgive my mum, purely because I cannot hold onto the anger anymore, but through her I have made conscious efforts to set boundaries that keep control of my own life even though some might say they are extreme.

My sister made friends with a dog on the big road we used to walk along to get to the nursery and infants school. She was so obsessed with stopping and petting this dog everyday that my mum actually made friends with the owner.

I remember this lady was really kind and when she went to Egypt once she asked mum to look after the dog, and when she came back she brought us presents. Jodie got a stone pyramid ornament and I got a clay replica of Tutankhamun's sarcophagus which I was fascinated with and still have to this day.

This growth has made me come to terms with the fact that my mum wasn’t always bad and that she had given me some good memories, although unfortunately these weren’t documented or if they were, then they were lost when she moved out. It wasn’t until I was talking to my lecturers about why I was manipulating the vintage images I had bought on eBay that I realised that these two were documented moments in a families life that had been lost to them. I started to obscure the identity of the people in the images; starting with children first and then the women because I was trying to put my own identity into theirs. I used bright colours because I was trying to associate the colours of the thread with the good memories that were lost in my own life into these images that had also become lost.

I was a really adventurous kid and me and my friend Beth really liked collecting insects because we were so interested in them. I remember once when we were going to the shop I found a frog in the road and was really worried about it getting ran over by a car. My mum waited with it whilst I ran back to the house to get a tub (when she probably just wanted to go to the shop and get home) and we put the frog in the tub and I released it into my garden thinking it would be safe. Unfortunately on the way to school the next morning I saw a frog in the road again and cried the whole way to school, my mum tried to reassure me that the frog was okay and even that it wasn’t the same frog. She must have thought she raised a really strange kid.

Another memory from along the same lines was I once found a butterfly with a broken wing, so I put it in a big jar with fruit and flowers and a paper lid with holes in so me and Beth could look after it. We ended up growing really attached to it and named it Fidgit, so when it finally died a few days later we were gutted. A couple of weeks later we found a kitten that my nannas cat had fathered and my mum let us adopt it; she even suggested we named her Fidgit.

The lost images become substitutes for my own memories when accompanied by the memories I write in this book. The title itself references the fact that I bought these images from eBay, and that it was possible for me to make this substitution for my own family from these lost images.

Acknowledgements To my mum, if you ever see this I need you to know that you’re forgiven because I can’t spend the rest of my life hating you for what happened.

With thanks to Tim Daly and Lynn Connolly the lecturers who have taught the publishing practice module that helped to bring this book together.

And also with recognition to the families that sold your family photos to me through eBay, I have no way of knowing who you are but thank you for clearing out your attic and allowing me to make this book.