Daughter of Crisis

I grew up in a house where the air itself carried mood. The tension didn’t arrive, it accumulated. Like static, or damp. You didn’t always hear it in her voice. You felt it first. The way the cutlery drawer opened. The footfall across the lino. The time she took to answer when you spoke.

In the household of a divorced single mother and a teenage girl, my friends tried to protect me. They did their best. But when hypothyroid madness reveals coercive control and occasional physical violence, there is only so much anyone else can do.

Her circadian rhythm was inverted. She spent the night awake, listening to AM talkback radio filled with right-wing fundamentalist zealots. She slept during the day. I would come home from school to housework. Washing dishes. Making dinner. Feeding the dog and chooks. Then homework. She was nocturnal. I was trying to survive.

She wasn’t kind. Not always. Not in the cycle of abuse. Harm, remorse, promise. Repeat. She could be brutal, erratic, possessive. She could rage over crumbs, or fall silent for days. But no one explained why. There were no labels. No diagnoses. Just a quiet, continuous undercurrent of Serepax, one tablet three times a day, and warnings that lived inside me. Don’t push her. Don’t set her off. That’s just how your mother is.

I internalised it all. The weight. The guilt. The vigilance. I mothered my own mother. I built my personality around avoiding detonation. I built my armour around myself. Not always successfully. A single misspoken word could set off a tirade that lasted for days.

I didn’t complain about the soft drinks thrown at my face, or how sticky it is in your hair. I didn’t complain about the cigarette burns in the carpet. I didn’t complain at all.

Because I had learned: if you complain, you make it worse.

At thirteen, I stood in public phone booths in the rain. I called the GP. I knew the pharmacist’s name. I knew how long a Serepax script lasted. I didn’t know what the drug did. I just knew she needed help. And this was the help she had.

I watched her change, and then stop changing altogether. The woman who raised me was no longer rising. She was flatlined. Chemically and clinically.

Now, I know. She wasn’t mad. She was in endocrine freefall. She wasn’t too much. She was sedated out of herself. She wasn’t cruel by design. She was abandoned without a name for what was wrong.

It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t diagnosed.
And it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t fix her.

I had my own bout with hypothyroidism, caused by unrelenting and chronic stress in my thirties and forties. It was during that period, researching the condition, that I finally saw the full horror of what had happened to Lottie.

The swelling. The fatigue. The cold. The cognition. The rage. The utter loss of self. The flattening of personhood.

And then came the other truth. The one I couldn’t avoid.

When I was diagnosed with autism, so much of my childhood came into focus. The hypervigilance. The shutdowns. The mimicry. The freezing. The PDA, mistaken for a bad temper, became a spark to her petrol. The deep, urgent desire to fix things that weren’t mine to fix.

And I saw her more clearly than ever before. Not as a villain. Not as a martyr. But as a woman unseen. And then unrecognisable. Even to herself.

She should have been seen. She should have been tested. She should have been offered more than sedation. She should have been believed.

I am what the system didn’t get to do to her. I am diagnosed. I am angry. I am articulate. I am still afraid of the quiet before the yelling starts, but now I know the shape of it.

This is not catharsis.
This is not memoir.
This is forensic memory.

Her name was Charlotte Ford. She was born on 6 May 1920. She died on 19 July 2005.

Lottie. On this day, what would have been your 105th birthday – I see you.

You were worthy. You were always worthy.
But this damned patriarchal, misogynistic world let us both down.

This closes the three-part file for Lottie Ford. A case of medical misogyny, medical bias, and medical neglect.

This is not forgiveness. But, Lottie, I do understand.

The Price of Quiet

In 1984, at the kitchen table after breakfast, Lottie was still hesitating about selling the house. I was thirteen, resisting the idea with the kind of immovable emotional gravity that only children can manage. Roy was at the sink, washing up the breakfast dishes. She raised the subject again, gently, nervously, that maybe they shouldn’t sell, and stay here in Maryborough.

He didn’t turn around.

“Oh, it’ll be sold all right. You’ll get your bloody half and I’ll get mine.”

That was the end of a marriage that had lasted forty-seven years. A marriage that started in World War Two, was blessed with a son, survived the loss of a son, continued through the medical crisis and grief, celebrated an adopted daughter; 47 years, ended with 15 words.

The divorce and property settlement would unfold slowly, bureaucratically, over the following years. But in that moment, the damage was done. The foundations cracked, the promise dissolved, and whatever love or duty had once held them together slipped into silence.

What followed was not rebuilding. Not reflection. What followed was Serepax.

Doctor’s Little Helper

Before Serepax, there was Vincent’s APC powder. Aspirin. Phenacetin. Caffeine.

Tipped into tea, taken at the sink, sold over the counter, handed from woman to woman like advice. For nerves. For cramps. For pressure. For life.

Phenacetin was toxic to the kidneys. It caused silent renal failure. It was eventually banned—but not before decades of women had used it daily. Lottie was one of them.

By the 1980s, phenacetin was gone, but the logic behind it remained. Women weren’t offered support. They were offered sedation.

Enter Serepax. Oxazepam. The little white tablet that didn’t raise eyebrows. Not scandalised like Valium. Not brutal like Mandrax. Serepax was positioned as gentle. Appropriate. Feminine.

“Serepax is gentle,” they’d say. “And sometimes, that’s all you need.”

But Lottie didn’t need gentleness. She needed thyroxine.

What Serepax Did, and What It Didn’t

Serepax binds to GABA receptors. It slows the central nervous system. It calms—but it also dulls. It sedates without healing. It mutes without solving.

What it doesn’t do is more important than what it does.

It doesn’t regulate metabolism.
It doesn’t support cardiovascular health.
It doesn’t restore thyroid hormone.
It doesn’t correct the biochemical collapse of post-surgical hypothyroidism.

Lottie didn’t need to be sedated. She needed her endocrine system supported. She needed a blood test. A plan. A dose.

But instead, she was handed quiet.

Eighteen Years of Slow Poison

Lottie had her partial thyroidectomy in 1969. No thyroxine was prescribed. No endocrinologist consulted. No one followed up.

And for eighteen years, her body deteriorated.

She had previously used Vincent’s powders, damaging her kidneys. She smoked two packets of cigarettes a day—forty cigarettes daily—constricting her blood vessels and starving her tissues of oxygen. She was eventually prescribed Serepax, which dulled the symptoms but never touched the cause.

This wasn’t benign neglect. It was accumulative harm. It was a system that kept handing her silence and calling it medicine.

Her body was in contradiction. One foot on the brake, hypothyroidism slowing her down. One foot on the accelerator, nicotine and anxiety pushing her to keep up.

No one was watching the dashboard.

Her weight crept up, from twelve stone to fourteen. Her energy declined. Her skin changed. Her cognition slipped. Her emotional regulation shattered.

They said she was hormonal.
They said she was difficult.
They said she was just getting old.

They said everything except the one thing that mattered.

“We failed you.”

The Silence of Renewals

Every few months, she would visit the GP. Not for evaluation. Not for curiosity or care. Just for authority scripts.

Her Serepax was renewed, over and over again, without reassessment, without bloodwork, without anyone asking whether it was still helping—or if it ever had.

There was no hormone panel. No psychiatric review. No second opinion. Just a refill.

The treatment she needed was simple. The question she needed someone to ask was obvious.

“Do you think this might be your thyroid?”

But no one asked. Not in 1971. Not in 1977. Not in 1985.

Symptoms Reframed as Personality

Lottie wasn’t treated. She was blamed.

Her emotional outbursts weren’t seen as neurological symptoms. They were called tantrums.

Her swelling wasn’t myxedema. It was weight gain.

Her exhaustion wasn’t hormonal. It was laziness.

Her paranoia wasn’t biochemical. It was madness.

She wasn’t seen as a woman whose body had been mismanaged. She was seen as a woman who was hard to love.

And when a woman becomes too loud, too fragile, too unrecognisable, people stop coming. Friends drifted. Family pulled away.

Eventually, even the mirror avoided her.

This Was Not a Personal Failure

This was not a woman who failed to take care of herself.

This was a woman no one took care of.

What happened to Lottie between 1969 and her death in 2005 was not the result of poor lifestyle choices. It was the result of systemic disinterest, gendered medicine, and a clinical culture that mistook sedation for support. Iatrogenic hypothyroidism. Doctor-caused harm

She was not sad. She was hypothyroid.
She was not mad. She was mismanaged.
She was not a lost cause. She was abandoned.

Mama’s Holding Things That You Can’t Buy

From The Chiaroscuro Anthology to The Infernal Dames

Yesterday, The Chiaroscuro Anthology closed with a poem depicting intergenerational trauma, starting with rage against parents, ending with a promise to a child.

So hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
Mama’s here to help you fly.
And if flying feels too much to do,
Mama’s gonna stay right here with you.

A soft ending to The Chiaroscuro Anthology—nineteen poems about my autistic experience.

Yet, I’m not just autistic. I’m a woman, 53 years on this earth, and furious.

Not Joking – Global Gender Parity in 2158

The World Economic Forum estimated, late last year, that it would take another 134 years to reach global gender parity.

134 years

This day, this year, this decade, this century—we have granddaughters still fighting the battles their grandmothers thought they had won. Intergenerational inequity. Injustice, passed down like recipes and silverware. From the Greats to the Silents, the Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and the unborn Gen Bravo.

The First Wave. The Second Wave. The Third Wave of feminism.

How many more waves must we ride when we’re already facing a tsunami?

A tsunami of dead women.
A tsunami of gender pay gaps.
A tsunami of stolen autonomy—of everything, even down to kitchen bench heights and seatbelts in cars.

Why not build a fire so big that not even this tsunami can extinguish it?

From this idea came The Infernal Dames.

While I have no children, I make this promise to the grandchildren of the next generation.

I do not want you to inherit the intergenerational trauma of centuries, the ache of millennia. I don’t want you to have to sing this lullaby and know it’s real:

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry
Mama’s holding things that you can’t buy
And if those things do make you cry
You’ll understand why, bye and bye.

The Infernal Dames

A forensic reckoning, a class action, a ledger of women burned by silence, by medicine, by the system.

We gave more care to punch cards than to living women. “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.”

We built hospitals where no one listened. “It’s anxiety. Lose weight.”

We prescribed silence. “Take this, it will help.”

We institutionalised grief. “You’re too much. Take this, it will help.”

We pathologised hormones. “You’re hysterical. Too much.”

We erased. “Your file could not be found.”

It is my intention that The Infernal Dames will roar.

Tomorrow, we begin.