In Denial: A Relapse Story

The scene was one Rachel had hoped would never come to pass: her in tears on her mother’s sofa, glass of wine on the table, as they discussed her potentially divorcing her once-perfect Adam.

“If you hate men so much, how did I even come about? You needed a man for a baby.” Rachel came off more mockingly sarcastic than she intended with that one, though her mother seemed to take it with coolness. Sheila cleared her throat, breathed slowly, and then began to speak.

“You know your Auntie Caroline? Well, she wasn’t in the London group at the time but she wrote for our little magazine. Adulterated, I think it was called. Anyway, so, she was studying up in Leeds and it was her birthday so she had a party. Only a handful of us from London went up - I did, your Auntie Yvette did, and a few others. Anyway, Caroline has this party in some backroom of a pub and invites everyone from her course, which meant men.” Sheila took a gulp of her drink and laughed. Rachel couldn’t understand why but she listened even closer in case she was missing jokes.

“I say ‘men’ but they were all a bit younger, not quite sure of themselves. Back then, you see, universities weren’t exactly enthusiastic about letting women onto their undergraduate courses, let alone do PhDs. Caroline was one of those rare few, which meant nearly all her friends at Leeds were men. I don’t know who it was - probably Caroline - but word soon got out that I was one of the few straight women in the room. And they knew me, they knew my face from the picture of me egging Henry Gale, and so they came up to me… and they were ridiculous, my god.”

“Were they creeps?” Rachel interjected, her brow furrowed.

“Goodness, no. They were just… off. Half of them wanted my autograph and couldn’t speak, as if they were the babbling idiots. The other half wanted my number and, well, you could tell what years of university with no women to talk to had done to them. They were more just desperate to the point of being absolutely pathetic, ha!” Sheila snorted so loudly that Rachel jolted up in her seat. “But, but, oh goodness, how funny they were. And your father, well, he was the only one who didn’t come up to me. Didn’t want an autograph or my number or both or anything: he talked to people, worked the room, and I just felt myself drawn to him.”

Rachel slouched back into the sofa, curling up in its corner with her wine glass untouched. It tasted too bitter to even sip it, which was odd for her given her usual love of a vino rosso of an evening.

“So, I went over to him. We talked. He was finishing his PhD at that point and I can’t remember what it was but I remember it piqued my interest. It was the drink, the chat, the fact that he didn’t come up to me with some nonsense pick-up line: all of it had me thoroughly charmed. When it came down to it, I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go home with the other creeps and I was still quite young. That’s the thing though, you never realise it at the time just how young you are. I was 27 or 28 and I felt like I knew everything. I bloody didn’t.”

Rachel felt a flutter in her stomach, like her mother’s words were resonating. She was still young, still didn’t have all the answers, still needed help. Indeed, that’s all she wanted from Adam and look what he did: started searching up ways to gaslight her into thinking she was going baby-brained and adult baby loony bins to dump her in. She was above it all, she was sure, even if she’d wolfed down a whole McDonalds and gotten her sofa at home greasy and ketchup-stained with her fingers. Even if she had thrown a tantrum in front of Adam. Even if she had found herself softening upon the sight of relapsed women. What evidence could Adam have possibly used against her? Her mummy… erm, mother… was right. Men were all the same and always would be: obnoxious, misogynistic, overbearing, self-interested, arrogant, unkind, smelly, stupid, not nice, dumb bum, stinky little meanies.

Her mother continued, snapping Rachel out of whatever haze drifted over her mind. She reasoned she was just tired and needed to be in bed sooner rather than later.

“I got back to London, thought nothing of it again until I started getting sick and started aching. My sisters thought I was relapsing or something, didn’t even think to check I was pregnant, and I got sent away. I went back to Leeds to stay with Caroline, found out I was pregnant, and that was that. That’s why you were born up north.” Sheila spoke as if done, though Rachel’s face still showed a puzzled look. This conversation wasn’t over by any means.

“But why not find my dad? Why not look for him?” Rachel asked with a hint of desperation in her voice.

“I didn’t want a man around, Rach. Caroline and I were a good team looking after you in the first few years - had there been a man in the picture, I’d have been under the thumb and you’d have had it drilled into you from birth that women were nothing but baby-brained idiots. I couldn’t have allowed that,” Sheila said proudly. “When I said I was having a baby, my sisters in the London movement were worried that could bring on relapse in me and I was basically exiled. I didn’t want to be rid of my baby and I didn’t want a man either, so your auntie and I made it work.”

Sheila glanced down at her watch. Her eyes widened in realisation at something, making Rachel shuffle nervously in her chair.

“Oh my, look at the time! I have to be off, Yvette’s having a party for her new book and I said I’d be there for 7. I have to go, darling, but I’ll be back before first light tomorrow… probably,” Sheila laughed as she got up and half-danced through the room collecting up her keys, her purse, and her phone.

Before Rachel could even form a coherent sentence to get her mother to stop, Sheila Buckland had floated out the door with a spring in her step and a “see you in a bit!” hanging in the air. Rachel felt alone, betrayed, and a little bit abandoned. Her mother’s words had touched her but her departure left her cold, as if she herself had done something wrong. Indeed, her mother hadn’t even asked her if she wanted to come along - Rachel’s state of overly casual dress notwithstanding.

When Rachel picked up her phone, she had seven missed calls from Adam and about a dozen texts begging her to come home. When she saw them all, she felt empty inside: all she had done for him and all she had trusted him, but now she was on some inexorable path to babyhood and he had to have control over her. Unfortunately for him, she was made of stronger stuff. She was a Buckland, a real woman of integrity and self-respect who didn’t get pushed around by controlling perverts like him. Rachel blocked his number and, for lack of a television in her mother’s flat, started to scroll through social media to take her mind off her present predicament.

Past random posts about American politics or silly memes she didn’t fully understand, her eyes lingered on a particular ad. It was a short clip playing on a loop of a young adult woman, clearly relapsed, bounding down a hallway into the arms of a slightly older man in a suit. Her curly black hair was up in two pigtails and her attire was merely a white nappy patterned with pink stars with a pink t-shirt that just barely reached her lower back. The video focused on the man’s face as he squeezed the woman’s padded behind and smiled, then cutting to the woman’s face in a blissful state and her thumb pressed firmly into her mouth. “Cosy nights start with Nightlies” was the tagline. Rachel paused on the frame of the adult woman sucking her thumb and smiled, imagining how comfortable she must have been, how sweet and serene to be so loved and pampered. A haze started to form over her thoughts.

She scrolled away and found herself watching a series of reels for a few seconds at a time - some funny, some serious, some seriously unfunny - until she stopped at an account called ‘Mama Joyce & Baby Kayla’. The video that popped up showed two women, one unrelapsed and appearing to be in her mid-forties while the other, clearly relapsed, looked no older than twenty-one years of age. It was a sight to behold but the older woman’s accent was a delight all on its own. Mama Joyce had the distinctive voice of a woman from the American South, though Rachel couldn’t place exactly where. It was a saccharine accent that played well with the babble and giggles emitted by her daughter, Baby Kayla. Rachel was engrossed in their antics, with this particular video following the pair on their way to a playdate with another “mommy & baby” influencer duo that lived nearby. Rachel’s attention was captured by the images that flashed across her screen: Mama Joyce patiently braiding Kayla’s hair while the baby-brained young woman squirmed and squealed, her neon pink pacifier bobbing up and down between her lips arrhythmically, the sight of Kayla bouncing on her padded bottom with her hands outstretched for her mother’s bosom. It was strange, much stranger than anything Rachel had seen before. When Joyce finally had Kayla ready to go out, she bent down to kiss her daughter on the forehead and then turned to face down the lens of the camera.

“Isn’t she just the cutest, folks?” Mama Joyce asked rhetorically, though Rachel was deep into her haze now and she nodded along as if personally asked. A pang of jealousy hit Rachel’s psyche. She wasn’t thinking clearly when she swiped past the video with an aggressively twitching thumb, her face scrunched up as she gazed at the cascade of colours and sounds her phone made as she scrolled on. For some reason, the pang of jealousy didn’t so much subside as deepen into something more: anger, resentment, yearning. She didn’t know what she wanted but she knew deep down she needed that sort of love and care. When she finally stopped her thumb from swiping, she landed upon a peculiar freeze frame: a bright-eyed girl, of a similar age to Baby Kayla, with bow-laden blonde hair and a frilly white blouse with little teddy bear images sewn into the collar. A dummy clip was visible right at the bottom of the screen, where the top edge of the bib of some pink overalls just peered out. The rosy fog that clouded Rachel’s mind in that moment seized her motor functions and forced her thumb to press upon the centre of the frame, causing the video to begin. It was, to her eyes, a marvellous and novel thing.

Here was a young American woman dressed up in the attire of a relapser yet entirely possessed of her own mind and agency. She introduced herself with a silly wave to camera and the words: “Hi every baby, it’s me - Daddy’s Darcy - and I’m here to talk about some pretty grown-up stuff. If you’re a real lil kiddo, look away now!”. Rachel instinctively turned away but caught herself and retrained her eyes upon the scene. Daddy’s Darcy talked cheerily about the “innocence movement” and about how they were taking the country by storm, including the subscribers to her YouTube channel in the number of the movement’s supposed followers. Then, she pivoted to talking about her relationship with her “daddy” and how he was working on relapse-proofing their apartment, how he treated her like a baby already, and talked with wild enthusiasm about how “relapse will be so liberating when it finally happens” for her. Rachel held the phone close to her eyes, concentrating hard upon every word that Darcy spoke. She was engrossed in her entirety.

Rachel nodded along as Darcy spoke, drinking in every word as if it was the most profound thing she had ever heard. It wasn’t at all and yet she could not summon any objections or stir any ill-feeling towards the girl before her. It was all making sense in a way it never had before. To sign off, Daddy’s Darcy lifted her pacifier clip up to reveal an oversized white-and-pink dummy. She plopped it in her mouth and lisped thanks to every viewer and supporter all across the world.

Without hesitation, Rachel dropped her phone sloppily upon the sofa and out came her left thumb. It meandered its way to her lips, but soon she was sucking on it as if ravenous for it. Rachel’s mature thoughts and wants dissipated rapidly, replaced by a vague sense of contentment and curiosity. All that mattered to her all of a sudden was her thumb in her mouth; all that she could suddenly recall was that image of Daddy’s Darcy sucking on a dummy. Beyond those two things was an endless and amorphous sense of the unknown, of which she was now totally innocent.

With her free hand, she batted her phone off of the sofa and let it clatter face-down upon the rug. It landed with a soft thud that made her giggle. This was Rachel now: innocent and free, reduced to infancy and risen above worries.

Warmth coursed through her mind like it was being washed, leading to a warmth coursing through her knickers and pyjamas before creeping onto the sofa.