If you’d have asked me 20 years ago whether I had a happy childhood, I would have said, emphatically, yes. Now I am viewing my nearly 60 years through a different lens and struggling to understand and forgive. Myself, my father and, most of all, my mother.
She died in October 2021 following a brief illness, just 3 weeks after a diagnosis of terminal cancer. It was all so fast, too fast to organise the care package, so it all fell down to me. When I read that sentence it makes me seem like an ungrateful, spiteful cow. ‘What about me?’ when it should have been all about her.
But it is part of a pattern that I am starting to understand went on throughout my life. I was never asked whether I could cope, whether I minded, there was always and expectation that I would just step up. There were no boundaries to what was expected of me, no option to say no.
At the end of 2021 I began to unravel and began a period of counselling that peeled back layer upon layer of what I thought had been my life but was actually my denial.
I lost my father in 2007, which was devastating. We were so close. There was nothing I couldn’t say to him or ask him. It was he that would take me to music lessons, take us to the zoo, read books to us and hug us. I honestly can’t remember my mother doing any of those things but that might just be how I am protecting myself at the moment.
How I wish I could talk to him about how I am feeling now and how difficult it must have been for him with a wife who took the role of another child and who pushed her daughter in to the role of adult from the tender age of 3.
I have started this blog as a way of coming to terms with things I cannot change and need to accept. It will be bitty, probably self-indulgent, but it is my truth and writing has always been my meditation, my way to peace.
Mummy wasn't nice 