How I got to know my mum in a Bangkok sex hotel

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/23/how-got-to-know-mum-bangkok-sex-hotel-christmas

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Christmas morning, 2010. I’m in bed with my mother in a Thai sex hotel. It is my 30th birthday. How have things got so out of hand?

To wind back a little, I hadn’t been looking forward to a third decade. My father had died three years before, and I’d responded with great resourcefulness, by having a comprehensive breakdown, ending a nurturing relationship and moving back home. I couldn’t work, or go out, and didn’t want to be seen. A life shrunk to four small walls was all that seemed manageable. I was watching The Lion King a lot, and doing all the voices.

So when my mother announced that we were going to Australia and Thailand for Christmas, I was unresponsive. Having been in the UK since 1979, she had recently become a British citizen and wanted to celebrate by flying as far away from Britain as geographically possible. She wanted me to see the Great Barrier Reef, she said. I pictured men in shorts, throwing pigskins at my head. But I had no other plans.

The Australian leg was … not good. I became extremely sick, which is my signature move. My mother, basically a toddler, had us pinballing between territories like they were rides at Alton Towers. In three weeks we flew from Perth to Cairns to Melbourne to Darwin. We spent about 40 minutes in Alice Springs. She was loving it; I was dragging the meat of my own carcass around. We went to Sydney for a single night, which I spent staring at a toilet bowl. In one airport I looked so rough they nearly didn’t let me on the plane in case I had bird flu. The night before we left the country, my ex called me on a hotel lobby phone to tell me our dog had died.

Like I said: not good. Still, there was everything to play for. Christmas in Thailand sounded like an idea from a “30 things to do before you’re 30” peak-experience hit list, the ones that fixate on kayaking, taking ayahuasca on Machu Picchu, or inconveniencing dolphins in Cancun. However, those lists are aimed at sexy young couples who like house music, not a depressed 29-year-old and his elderly mother. Don’t imagine beach huts or tinsel-strewn palm trees. Owing to a lack of online hut-booking facilities, and mobility issues, we were to spend the week sharing a Bangkok hotel room.

You may have a dated, stereotypically seedy mental image accompanying the words “Bangkok hotel room”. You’d be correct. Instead of chocolates, they left condoms on the pillows of the bed. The bed which we were sharing. The “door” to the bathroom was a barely frosted glass slat, a saloon door to a nightmare. A week on a porn set was not how I’d pictured becoming a man. At least, not like this.

So there we were, Christmas morning in a Buddhist land, my birthday, no tinsel, surrounded by sex aids. The thing was, with nothing else to do, we sat in the room and talked. I couldn’t remember the last time we had. Depression had left me uncommunicative, paralysed, angry with the world. There is so much shame attached to not being able to function, and I knew my life hadn’t progressed. I was turning 30 having not realised any dreams. I felt small.

Finally talking, it became clear none of that stuff mattered to her. I’d done nothing in my whole life to make her proud, yet unfathomably, she was proud anyway. She’d used her savings for us to be able to go away as far away as we could, to show me things, for me to be happy.

And I asked her about her life, which I’d never done, having always assumed I just emerged from a fog in the 1980s. She told me she’d been born in a trench in Burma during the war. How her mother had suffered too much to bear, losing many children. How my mother raised her surviving siblings. How later, after the death of my father – her husband – she’d not given up on life, and taught herself a new skill every year, conga drumming, sculpture, digital storytelling. We talked about what it means to surrender your Indian passport forever, and take a British one. I realised I came from somewhere, which is to say I realised I was alive.

No one tells you the truth about adulthood, which is that you spend most of it missing people, and only a handful of moments last. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to not shut out the people we love, because they’re all that keeps us here. I didn’t transform. I can happily report I’m still grumpy, ungrateful and complain a lot. But I started to understand, that Christmas. And I started to mend.

Thanks, Mum. And Merry Christmas, everyone. Wherever you are.