Halfway Through

I started my MA in October 2016, as my mum died. I had surgery a month later. It was Christmas before I knew it. It wasn't really until the later end of January 2017 that I started to try and focus. Then I went on Zoladex for six months, which had the unexpected side effect of levelling my mood to the point where I could actually work. My grades swung up.

My second TMA (an evaluation of a primary resource and a secondary source) scored me a whopping 85%. Turns out working with primary sources informally for several years gives you some useful analytical skills.

Then I had two lengthy assignments on poverty and the evolution of the seaside resort. The first essay got away from me a bit, but still scored a respectable 78%.
My final TMA was written for my mum. Before it was due, I went to my dad's house and scoured my mum's bookshelves for all useful literature. I came home with a pile the height of my toddler. I kinda ignored the question on the theory of urban renaissance, and wrote a history on the birth of Cromer for my mum. And my tutor loved it, and I got 82%, rightly losing marks for er...skating over the actual question.

That was back in August. This left me with four months to come up with an idea for a dissertation, research it, write a proposal and sample chapter and get it in for the first week of January. Yeah, the OU don't like us enjoying Christmas. I had decided to do something on illegitimacy months before, and this was sharpened when I studied the changes in the welfare state. This was partly because of my mum: she was an unmarried mother in the fens at the end of the 1970s, and she suffered a lot of stigma and loneliness and I wanted to know where that came from, particularly as my experiences of family research showed illegitimacy to be historically endemic among the rural working class.
However, I also wanted to study crime, and had been intrigued by stories of infanticide in the press when studying the crime and justice unit in my MA. So I decided to look at how the two were linked, using Coroner's records. Victorian Coroner's records are pretty much my favourite ever source. They are handwritten depositions taken at inquests, and they give the working class a voice that you just don't find (except occasionally in court reports) in the Victorian era. They also tie in with my morbid fascinations with pathology and history of medicine.

I spent six weeks going to the library every week to transcribe my source, (and have since done lots of further research on them), and I then wrote a proposal over six weeks. I was incredibly poorly over Christmas, getting flu and then a chest infection and then cholecystitis, so the essay aspect of my EMA got banged out in a fit of painkillers and delirium. But I got it in on time, so whatchagonnado?

And then I waited. I had PLANS for January and February, like going to SEE people I haven't seen for the better part of a year, only my fucking gallbladder meant I was on a sparrow diet of fuck all, in pain 70% of the time, and couldn't walk to the school without getting breathless. So instead, I kept working on family histories, and watched a shitload of RuPaul's Drag Race. We can't be cultured all the time, darling.

I signed up for the dissertation module of my MA, which was a painful £2000 to see go all at once (I used a mixture of student finance and OUSBA to pay for the first module as I went along). I also applied for a research grant to fund some books and going to the National Archive.

My results came in on 12th March. I got 69%, a pass with merit. Yes, I would've liked 70%  but what can you do? It turns out that my proposed topic is too woolly, and my methodology and TERMS need defining. Naturally, I need to wait two months to get allocated a tutor before I can screech "heeeelppppp" at them. In the mean time, I have a literal library of stuff to read.

I have spent the time since my mum died deliberately immersing myself in work. I have coped by reading and producing hundreds of thousands of words of history. By telling people's stories. By reminding myself that grief is a hallmark of human experience.
And I have been antisocial, and I have hidden from real people, because living in the present frightens me. I am possessed by a tidal wave of grief that rises inside me, but never comes out, because I won't let it. Because I am afraid to lose control, and I have become so accustomed to sitting on my feelings that I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do with them.
I channel my grief into my work, to stop me going numb. And when I cried at the unhappy deaths of children in the 1880s, I was crying for my mum. And when I cried because it all got too much, I cried for my mum. And when I told everyone all about the stuff I'd found out, I was trying to tell my mum. When I lay terrified and in pain with cholecystitis, I only thought of my mum doing the same eighteen months before for different reasons. When I lost weight, I thought of my mum losing weight. When I had my abdominal scan, I thought of my mum's abdominal scan that I held her hand through because she was so frightened. I was not afraid, I was only sad.

But when I write beautifully, I do it for my mum. When I do well, I do it for my mum.

I wonder if I'll ever do stuff for me again.