Quite Accomplished Now Really, If I'm Honest

When I started this blog, it was specifically to chart my educational progress with the Open University and the ranting was just a nice side-project.

I decided to sign up to do a degree in October 2011, thinking maybe I would be able to get a better job with a degree. I started my first module about a month later. I had zero confidence. I had zero self-esteem. I had just come out of a hideous breakup, left my job, had two very small children and I didn't know what else to do with myself. My first module started in February 2012, when my (then) youngest was ten months, and my eldest was thirty four months. Neither of them were at preschool at that point. I lived on my own. I was bored. I was angry. I was determined.

So I worked. I worked nonstop for four years to achieve my undergraduate degree in June 2016, with first class honours. During that time, I got divorced, remarried, had another baby, got my eldest diagnosed with autism. Uni was the basenote through those four, strange years, always there to focus on when everything else was going to shit.

July 2016, I was awarded my degree, my kids finished school for the summer. What next? What next? I couldn't bear the thought of having nothing to do, and Alex was only just one. I had developed a all-consuming passionate hobby in family history, and decided to have a stab at a history masters to professionalise my credentials.

Three days later, Mum got ill. You know that story. You know how that ended.

But I carried on. I could have stopped. Nobody would have been surprised if I'd deferred. But I needed the framework, I had to have something that wasn't mourning, something I could do that she would have loved, that I could do in her memory. As time went on, it stopped being about Mum and started being about the people whose deaths I was studying, it started being about bringing long forgotten processes to light, it started being about something more useful than a mere grief process.

From May 2018 until January 2019, I worked like a demon, reading everything relevant, spending hours researching Every Single Woman in the Assizes in Northamptonshire in a Thirteen Year Span to make one pie chart. I started to pull it together. My dissertation was titled Infant Death in the Coroner's Court, but it was about women and mothers, childcare and illegitimacy, and the juxtaposition of working-class women in a court of men. It was about the deliberate exclusion of women from judicial process concerning them, judicial process where their lives were at stake. It was about how limited networks of men developed in cities, to judge and govern the lower classes. It was about gendered space. It was about how we used to live, and how we used to die.

I had my mum in mind while I wrote it, and I thought of her experience, and how she might have been treated had my brother been born one hundred years earlier, and how she might have been treated had he been born even ten years later.

I passed. I passed with merit.

This masters is for me. 

For my mum. 

For the women whose stories I was privileged to tell in my dissertation. 

For my kids who, I hope, will understand why Mummy never stopped wanting to learn. 

I couldn't have done it without my beloved husband, who never read a word of it but patiently listened to me bellowing on about it most days. Or without my in-laws, who looked after Alex while I went to the library every week to transcribe the relevant data set. Or without my sister, Jess, who DID read every word of it, and provided feedback as well as being a soundboard for me sorting out arguments in my head. My siblings, my Dad, my friends, random people in the library, who have listened to me blarting on about dead babies over the last year  - you're all saints, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I couldn't have done any of it without the OU, and my tutors, or without the expert guidance of Peterborough archive staff, and the Coroner's Society historian. Or without my Learned Friends, especially Dr B.

You've all been the most magnificent cheerleaders. I am so grateful. I graduate in June: I didn't bother with my undergrad graduation, because Mum was about to die, but this time, I will.

What happens next? I don't know. I don't want to stop, but I also recognise that I  might have to. I've developed a business from this, and you can find me at Sophie Michell's Family Research if you want to HIRE ME, as I am now OFFICIALLY a professional historian.

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.