Mafalda's Daughter

journal - 18 may

2009-05-19T06:00:00.003Z

i have given up trying to keep track of which day of the journal this is - i can't do the maths - so i will date them now. this is a new method of writing my journal. i've switched off the little google notifiers that tell you if you have new e-mails and i'm writing this in a note thingy that i can cut and paste from. so i should get less distracted. if i could write properly with a pen i would do that but i can hardly write at all these days - i never did like it much but as i have got out of practice it makes my hand hurt.

i am sitting here on the sofa with the whole family; my husband watching footie with the headphones on, my son watching without sound, the dogs snuggled up with us. there is something ancient and primeval about having a dog sleeping with his head on your lap. what with my dog's head and the laptop i am nice and warm.

i have a lot to think about after my session with my psychotherapist today. there is the whole thing of why i am so busy and buzzy all the time. i have been aware that it is to stop me thinking but i always looked at this in too simplistic a way. i thought it was about trying to stop my conscious mind dwelling on things that worried me, whether in today's world or from the past. but it is more complex. i was describing my head like a computer; the hard drive containing the memories and the ram being the thinking conscious bit. so i was thinking that if i were to stop 'doing' the memories would seep into the ram bit and be a bit disconcerting. but there is more to it than that.

when i am anxious for my son about things i think might hurt him, i am not able to be a proper adult in relating to him . there is still inside me the child who didn't have recognition for her own pain and fear. so my feelings about my son are all tied up with that. i can't separate how i felt from the way things are for him. today we talked about how important it is to look after the child inside; how unless i can find a way through the fear and anxiety of the past it will continue to influence the present. i need to re-examine the past from the point of view of an adult. i am going to do this a bit at a time. a lot of what i have written before will help me to make a start.

journal - day 12

2009-05-15T08:19:00.002Z

a bit of a gap again in my journal. the days when i am working seem to be too full to think at all. today is my day off and i am planning a nice soak in the bath followed by a walk with the dogs.

since my last post i have been working on looking after myself. i have started yoga again to try and tackle the aches and pains that have been getting to me. i have booked a massage for 26 may. i cycled to work yesterday (a ten mile round trip). i'm trying to eat more healthily.

i'm also looking after myself in terms of thinking about things. i haven't managed to get much head space yet but i have been thinking when i can. a couple of things that would have got to me in the past were much less of an issue. for example, yesterday my boss was a little bit short with me and in the past i would have taken it very much to heart, but i realised that she was strung out by stuff going on and managed not to take it personally. sure enough a little while later she was fine so it wasn't me she was crotchety with.

and i have managed to refrain from telephoning one of my friends who is having troubles. early in the week i rang to check how she was and said if she needed anything at all she should call me. she hasn't and i am leaving it to her to contact me when she needs to, rather than constantly calling her.

another friend is worried about her son. i was able to talk to her in what i think was a helpful way (a lot of it relates to stuff we have been through) and to comfort her without feeling i had to take all of her stuff on. so things are moving around a bit in my head.

journal - day 7

2009-05-10T08:49:00.003Z

the first thing to mention is that in spite of trying to keep a daily journal i have only managed to write a weekly one so far. for someone who only works 2 days a week, with various other stuff dotted around, it is amazing that i haven't managed to find time. it is not that i haven't had slots of time but that i need head space to write this sort of thing. one thing that my life seems completely devoid of is head space. because my son is at home all the time at the moment there is never a time when i am alone in the house. if he is not in the room i am in i can hear him - gunshots and police chases on the computer, bb gun in the hallway (we won't let him use it in the garden so i have made him a board to catch the ones that miss rather than the wall getting it), getting tools out to make things. this is the nature of someone with autism and adhd. i wouldn't change him but it can be very much in your face, and we have a very small house.

that in itself is not insurmountable. i could go to an internet cafe, or indeed take my laptop to the beach or somewhere. i think what the issue is that i need to learn to give myself permission to have some head space. when i don't have it i am aware that i get more buzzy and distracted. so lesson 1 is to timetable in an appointment for me to write this journal, and take photos and just be me.

this week has had more than its fair share of stress. i have been waiting for a job to be advertised at work. it is a job i can do, i would be good at and more importantly it has job security and a decent income. to start with it would be full time (which would mean even less me time) but after a period i would aim to go down to 4 days a week. last week i was off work with a dreadful throat infection. this week i came in on wednesday and found via a friendly colleague who knows i want this job that it had been advertised internally, only for a week, and that i had missed the closing date by one day. i would not have found out had my colleague not had dinner with someone who mentioned it. this week we were moving offices so i had no computer and could not have got onto the intranet.

when i found out about this i was speechless. then i was furious. in the past i would have cried about it but it is so vital that i get some sort of stable job that i just lost the plot. my colleague arranged an extension of time for me to get my application in and i wrote it overnight and got it in the next morning. my first thought was that it was a total stitch up and that someone had their eye on the job but my colleague says this is much more likely to be sheer bad luck. she worked in HR for years so i trust what she says, but the whole thing left me very shocked and shaken. thank heavens i am very good at putting job applications together. they have to give me an interview because i am disabled, and they know i am not someone who will roll over if they treat me unfairly so i hope i am back in with a chance. but this destabilised me quite a lot and left me very buzzy.

also there is the business of my son's education and trying to sort out a place that can bring out his many strengths. we have been to visit somewhere that is ideal and so now the battle for funding starts. i am quite good at battling but it is tiring. also we have had a big breakthrough in that we managed to get my son to come to an open day at a local agricultural college. he was very resistant and it was hard going but he stayed for quite a while in what cannot have been an easy environment for him and even said he liked some bits of it. on the way home we drove by the potential school so he had a visual idea of it. as i drove i was aware that i was rigid with stress. i ache from head to foot at the moment, and it may well be stress related.

as well as that, i have a couple of friends who are in a bit of a bad way. i am trying to learn the skill of supporting my friends but not wading in and rescuing them. i need to let people develop their own solutions to problems but to be there for them. i am a compulsive rescuer so this is a new skill to learn. i need to trust that people will ask for help if they need it, which a lot of people won't. i think i hate to see people's distress and not be able to help them. i suppose the distress bounces off my own memories of distress and current feelings of distress and kind of prods them.

what i need to learn is that people's feelings are related to who they are, not who i am. so if someone is feeling rejected, for example, they are feeling it within their own framework of beliefs and feelings. they are not necessarily feeling rejection overlaid with the long history of rejection that i have. so while my feelings when i am rejected nowadays might be somewhere like 13 on the richter scale, other people might be feeling it at say 5. i need to learn to avoid ascribing my feelings to others. i think there is a term for this but i have no idea what it is (note to self - look it up on google).

this thing was something i was very aware of when my son was younger. autistic kids have huge meltdowns when the world gets too loud for them (i use loud to mean all the senses, not just hearing). my son used to cry and scream and exhibit signs of devastating grief that i found completely overwhelming. my husband, who does not have the same baggage as me, used to deal with them so i could go out of earshot when it became too much. it was because i could not put myself in my son's shoes; could not see that his grief was not that of a child whose mother doesn't want them but was entirely different. it is ironic that one of the ways autism manifests itself is an inability to place oneself in someone else's shoes. while empathy is something i am good at in some, less pressured, circumstances, when i am stressed i tend to over-empathise. or more accurately to climb inside someone's pain. rather than holding their hand, i try and scoop out the pain and take it away.

from writing this i can see that there are two facets to this. one is that i can't separate my own history of pain from other peoples; the other is that i compulsively rescue people because of my history. it is not a great combination. if someone exhibits pain i feel compelled to help; yet i then buy into their pain way more than is helpful to either them or me.

i think how i will approach this is not to avoid people who are in pain. that would do me even more harm as i would feel i was rejecting them, which sets off yet more alarm bells in my mind. what i will do is to look at it using the same model we used when i worked in a community law centre. lawyers in private practice take people's problems and sort them out for them. the law centre aimed to empower people by helping them to sort out their problems and at the same time equip them better to deal with the next problem that comes along. so i think i will adopt that approach with people who are in distress. holding their hand and walking alongside them as they work out their own answers. and trying to keep in mind that they are not me, either now or when i was young.

in practical terms i think it helps me to support people online or by e-mail rather than on the phone. i am not great on the phone, due to my hearing and lack of focus, whereas e-mail allows me to read over what i have said and spot any signs that i am over-identifying with someone else's stuff.

so this week's goal, among quite a few others, is to stop and think about my emotional response to other people's pain, to use my skills to support them in their journey rather than picking them up and carrying them. and to book a massage...

journal - day 1

2009-05-06T04:37:00.004Z

i am trying to deal with the fallout from the past. i have been trying on and off to do this for most of my adult life but there is a new incentive for me now. not only is the anxiety and self-doubt affecting my own functioning but it is spilling over and affecting my son. among the other things he has to negotiate, he has now developed generalised anxiety disorder. people have been saying to me for years that i am too protective of him, too afraid of things happening, and that i have to start letting him go out into the world. his autism has given me the ideal excuse for being over-protective; he took a long time to develop road sense, and where we used to live had dangerous roads.

lately, after a particularly stressful couple of years, my son's anxiety has moved into new realms and he has become anxious about more and more of life. added to this is a physiological problem which has yet to be stabilised, which causes motion sickness, making car travel really hard for him. so his world has shrunk. we have been trying to get some help with developing his independence skills for some time. my husband and i are not the best people to do this with him; me because of my anxiety, my husband because of his impatience. but so far it is down to us, so i need to work hard to put the anxiety back in its box, for my son's sake as well as my own.

part of this process is to record what makes me anxious, so i can face it. this in itself is quite a job. most things seem to make me anxious. because it is so all-pervading i am going to try and record what gets to me. in particular, i am going to try and take note of when i indulge in displacement behaviour.

for me, displacement behaviour seems to take two forms. the most obvious one is that whenever i am stressed i will start doing things, usually in an effort to bring order to my environment. but rather than the more usual tidying or cleaning, i will get out my toolbox and start fixing up shelves, putting things on walls, mending doors. very early in life i developed a sort of home-making tendency. i scrounged things from the neighbours in our flat to put in my bedroom, brought things in from the dustbin area to add to my collections, made dens in the shrubbery in the communal garden. i must have been the only 14 year old to buy a sofa.

(in fact the story of the sofa is quite a funny one, involving my friend and i pushing it up the road until the castors fell off, whereupon we sat on it in a layby trying to work out what to do. luckily a truck came by occupied by some men from the water board. they put the sofa in the back and transported us the 5 miles or so to my house. how we ever thought we could push a sofa 5 miles i have no idea but this episode gives some idea of the extent to which displacement behaviour can go.)

the other thing i do, if it is too late to start drilling holes in walls, is to open a bottle of wine and shut my anxiety up that way. of the two sorts of behaviour this one is probably the least healthy. it takes quite a bit of wine to squash down serious anxiety, which is not so good for the body, or indeed for the mind in the long run.

so the plan is that when i feel the need to indulge in either sort of behaviour, i will instead sit myself down and try and write about what thoughts and feelings i am trying to avoid. this doesn't mean that i will stop putting up shelves or drinking wine, but i will be aiming to do those things in a more healthy way, rather than a pathological sort of way.

so here goes...

re-defininition

2009-02-13T07:33:00.004Z

when i started writing yesterday's post i had a different shape in mind for it. but as so often happens it had a life of its own and went its own way.

what i had wanted to say was that the friend who was living with terminal illness refuses to let it define her: she goes on courses to learn skills that she may not get the chance to practice, she brings people together who can enrich each others lives, she spreads positivity and energy in abundance. what i planned to say was that if someone facing such a challenge refuses to let something so huge define them, then i too can change how i define myself.

i wrote yesterday's post in my lunch hour at work. as i left work i received a text. it was from the woman i wrote about. she had been to her oncologist and been told that the tissue that had been thought to be lung cancer, therefore secondary tumours, hence the death sentence, was in fact much more likely to be scar tissue. this means that the cancer has not spread to her lungs. which in turn means she no longer has the figure in the hooded cloak in the corner every time she looks round.

my joy at this news was not just for her, and for her life, but for her little girls, who will no longer face growing up motherless. they will have a mum there when they start their periods, when they have their own babies, when they are hurt and when they are proud. they will have a mum to fight for them and cry for them and laugh with them. such a gift is beyond measure.

and she will redefine herself too. she may be able to slow down a little; take some pressure off herself. she has time now to do the things she wants to do. she is no longer defined by the prospect of an early death, but by having gone through that experience and come out of the other side, wiser and more alive than ever.

definition

2009-02-12T12:58:00.002Z

something i read yesterday made me think about something i said recently.

i answered an ad from someone who needed volunteers to dig her garden. she has terminal cancer and young children. i thought the one thing i have a fair bit of these days is time, which she doesn't. it turned out she is connected to me via her daughter, although i didn't know it when i rang her.

we were sitting having coffee with some friends last week and the conversation turned to what makes us tick. i found myself saying, in a voice that sounded like someone had their hands round my throat (as i always sound when on this subject) that i had left my mum when i was 8 and that it had defined me and shaped everything i did to one degree or another. the minute i said it i thought how absurd it sounded; a woman of nearly 50 on the outside and only 8 years old on the inside.

another thing that came into the conversation that day, as we all had connections with autism, and also with twins, was that i said i thought my mum might have been autistic and that her identical twin probably was too.

i spend much of my life as an advocate for my son; telling the world how he sees and feels things (at least how i think he does), fighting for his rights, nurturing his talents and tending his hurts. i like to think i understand a fair bit about life on the autistic spectrum, both through my son and myself. yet in all this time i have never really given a thought to how the two things interacted in my mum's case.

her fear of germs, her obsessive compulsive tendencies, her social prickliness, her apparent lack of sense of humour, her chronic anxiety. how did these things fit with a series of violent partners, a wild, uncontrollable, hyperactive child, a world where women were supposed to toe the line and be submissive? how did she manage as a woman with intellectual interests, self-taught and proud, on a rough council estate? was she aware of the laughter at her flamboyant clothes, her wide-brimmed hat with a red rose, her lipstick, her vowels? did she feel alone; adrift?

i have in the past looked at her rejection of me as a function of her being a twin. that she had already known too much closeness. but maybe the explanation lies elsewhere. what if there had been more support and understanding? would she have felt she had to give me up then?

i will never know the answers to these questions. but i am coming round to the idea that i have to work towards re-defining myself. i have to take up the mantle of a fighter, a woman of integrity and strength, humour and kindness, and leave behind the 8 year old with an empty space inside. until i do that i have one hand tied behind my back.

blood

2008-02-08T05:38:00.003Z

it seems my head needs tidying up. things that are happening now are pulling up memories that i haven't tidied away properly. a very wise person has explained to me how our minds sort out memories and why it is important that they are processed and put to bed. it seems that minds collect things into clusters. these clusters are not always totally logical. sometimes things get clustered with other things for no obvious reason. but there will be a reason, even if we can't see it. there will be a common thread. maybe a smell that was there when things happened. maybe the light was a particular way. i am going to try and sort out my memories, in the hope that they will haunt me less if they are tidy. my mind is very visual. my memories are like pictures. so this is going to be like putting them into albums instead of stuffed into a big shoebox.

the most powerful cluster that i am conscious of is blood. it is a theme that has been there at many times in my life when i have felt afraid.

i am 6. i find a piece of pretty blue glass in the ground in my friend's garden. their house is new and the garden is still being made. part of the glass has bubbles in it. i decide to snap the bubbly bit off so it will fit in my pocket. the glass bites into my finger, very deep, and blood pours out. i don't understand why. my friend's mum patches me up and i am sent home. it should have been stitched. there is still a scar and a piece of finger with no sensation, over 40 years later.

i am 7. i am playing in the garden of a house called glebe cottage. it is where maria and her daughters, mitt and teeny, live. maria is my dad's girlfriend. later she will become my stepmum. she is a doctor and glebe cottage belongs to the hospital where she works. mitt and teeny and i are in the hedge. it is huge and dark and dusty. i am wearing flip flops. i run along beside the fence. suddenly there is a sharp pain in my foot. i look down and i have trodden on a nail in a broken down bit of fence. i can see it sticking up in the skin on my instep, although it hasn't broken through, just stretched it up in a point. i scream and pull my foot away. we go inside and maria puts a plaster on it. a couple of days later i am at home with my mum. my foot aches and she takes me to the hospital. i am given a tetanus jab and my foot is cleaned up and bandaged with a huge white bandage. after the plaster this looks odd. at school everyone wants to be my friend because i have a bandage.

i am 7. i am staying the night with maria and the girls. my dad is at work. it is hot and humid. we go to bed. there is a lot of noise downstairs and maria comes up and tells us that dad has been in a car crash. he has gone to have his head stitched up. later we hear him come in. i sit up in bed as he pushes open the door. i scream. he has 2 black eyes and his head is swollen and square, with 13 stitches across the top that look like barbed wire. he is like frankenstein. he is soaked in blood from head to toe. it seems he has severed an artery in his head. he laughs and tells me the blood was squirting 6 feet in the air but that it is ok. i can't bear to hug him with the blood. it smells of rust.

i am 8. i have moved in with my dad and maria. i go on holiday in north wales with my mum. we stay at my gran's. my cousin kelvin is killed by a car. he was the same age as me but i didn't know him. all the adults are broken. they cry and stare into space.

i am 11. now i live with maria and my dad and mitt and teeny. we live in a tiny cottage called hillside which also belongs to the hospital. no-one is really interested in the garden apart from me. i have a patch where i plant things that i have bought with my pocket money. one day my dad has a cut arm and has to have it bandaged. maria tells us he cut himself with the sickle while he was trimming the hedge. but when the bandage comes off we see there is more than one cut. and no-one trims a hedge with a sickle.

i am 12. i find blood in my knickers. maria says i have become a woman. we have a special red meal to celebrate, steak and red wine and red cabbage. this celebration of my blood has a profound effect on me. i never feel my periods are a 'curse' as my mum called them. they are a special thing, a sign i am a woman.

i am 14. my mum has a new husband. they live in a flat at the top of a tall house in canynge square, in bristol. my aunt tells me that the new husband is dangerous. he has been in prison for 'bottling' his wife's lover. at first i think this means the same as bottling fruit but it turns out he cut his face with a broken bottle. i am afraid for my mum. when i ask her she tells me that he was in prison for blowing up water mains as part of the free wales army. neither of these quite rings true to me.

i am 15. i get home from school. my dad's mg is in the drive. no-one is in the house. on the mantlepiece is an envelope addressed to maria in my dad's square draughtsman's capitals. my stomach lurches. i know something is not right. i run upstairs and into my dad and maria's room. on the bedside table is my dad's watch and his loose change. the sheets are pulled back and there is blood. i run downstairs and ring maria at work. she says she will come home. it turns out my dad has taken an overdose of morphine sulphate that would have killed a horse and gone away to die. we find this out when a man rings. he had been walking his dog and found my dad under a bush. i go in the ambulance with him. my ears are ringing. when we go back to school maria tells them that my dad had pneumonia.

i am 17. i have a cz motorbike which is my pride and joy. one night i go out with my boyfriend tom on the back. we are following some friends to a country pub. they are in a car. suddenly the bike slews across the road. we have hit mud. there is a huge crash and i feel a sharp pain in my face. i sit up and put my hands to my face. they are covered in blood. i scream for tom but i can't see him. he comes out from behind the hedge. he is ok. my face is plastered in blood and i think only about my looks. our friends in the car come back for us. when we get to the pub my teeth are chattering. the only injury is a tiny cut on my upper lip. when i get home my dad shouts at me. maria says this is just because he is worried.

i am 18. i am living in a house with my dad. he has left maria and is now going out with linda, who later becomes his third wife. he is out. i go to bed and dream he has hung himself. later maria and her friend carol come to the door. it is 3am. they tell me that my dad has crashed his car and is in intensive care. as we drive back to portsmouth it becomes clear that he crashed his car on purpose. this is not one that can be explained as an accident. he drove his soft-top mg into a parked articulated lorry on the other side of the road at 80 mph. there are no skid marks. he severs an artery in his neck and his legs are crushed by the engine. he is in intensive care for a long time. i did not see any of this blood. i could not face seeing him so i sat outside while my boyfriend tom sat with him. in some ways imagining the blood is worse.

i am 19. i am at college in kingston, studying law. a girl in our year is in a car crash in her mini and dies. she is a friend but not a close friend. however i feel i have to do something. i organise for a tree to be planted and a plaque made to remember her. years later there is an article in the law society gazette about kingston, with a picture on the front page. the tree is in full bloom.

i am 21. i am at my dad and linda's flat in southampton. it looks out over a wood. there is a phone call. my cousin andrew has been run over by a car on his 21st birthday. he dies 2 days later. when we were kids we went on holiday together. he baked green cakes.

i am 22. tom and i live in a bedsit in a huge house. it is chaotic and dirty and one of the other tenants sets the house on fire 3 times in a short space of time. the police investigate and find who it is. in the tenant's room is a shoebox with a turd inside. the landlord tells him to leave. they are on the stairs. the tenant hits the landlord and the landlord pushes him away. he falls against the window which breaks. like everything else in the house, it doesn't get fixed. a few days later our cat cuts his front leg on the broken window. it is a real mess and needs to be stitched up. i make him a little denim trouser to stop him chewing the stitches.

i am 34. i am married to mike. we live in a little cottage on a main road. i discover i am pregnant. we are overjoyed. i take special care of myself, do everything i can to make my body a good place to grow the baby. 10 weeks into my pregnancy i start to bleed. the doctor sends me for a scan. the ultrasound lady is called mary. she is quietly spoken and gentle. she is silent for a long time as she moves the ultrasound thing over me. she looks up and tells us that there is no baby. i am puzzled. she says i have already started to miscarry and it has moved from view. it will come out over the next few days. we are numb with grief. i ring my friend tina, who has gypsy blood and knows things and has known me since we were 12. she says that i will think i am bleeding to death but that it is better to stay home sitting on a towel than go into hospital, unless i get really ill. her sister had a miscarriage so she knows. we try to get on with daily life. we go shopping to a large tescos with our neighbour. as we stand in the queue i feel cramps. we get home as fast as we can. mike lights a fire in the bedroom and i go to bed. i ring friends, trying to take my mind off what will happen. one friend says 'at least it shows you can conceive'. i know she is trying to be kind but it cuts me. our doctor comes to see me. he is irish and has a ginger beard. he does not seem to notice the threadbare carpet on the floor of our bedroom. he goes straight to the fire to warm his hands and says he had a fire just like it in dublin when he was a student. he is kind and human. i say that i can't understand why i am so upset as it is just a tiny thing we are losing. he says it is not a tiny thing, it is our hopes, our dreams, of our child. it is imagining our child growing up, playing on the beach, running, laughing. it is imagining our child as an adult, making a life. this strikes me as incredibly wise and helps enormously with the pain. later that night the little thing is gone. there was indeed a lot of blood but it felt right to sit in my own bed, in a room lit only by firelight, holding the hand of the man i love.

i am 35. i am pregnant again. i find out i am pregnant the week the other baby would have been born. i don't have the same optimism for this baby. i feel my body is unworthy and unsafe for a baby. i decide that taking care didn't work before so i am just going to carry on as normal and leave things to fate. luckily my body knows better and i go off wine and coffee and eggs and all sorts of things that might not be good for the baby. at about 10 weeks i start to bleed. i feel cold and numb. every time i go to the loo i look for signs. i am working as a lawyer, trying to keep it together. i park my car outside my friend's house every day. one morning i am bleeding and i go in and burst into tears. i am wearing a blue and white stripy dress. she hugs me. the bleeding stops, then starts, then stops. i cannot bear it. at about 18 weeks i am at work and i start to really bleed. bright red, pouring blood. i ring mike. he comes to get me and takes me home. (later one of the partners at work comments about me leaving suddenly and i tell him sarcastically that i didn't want to ruin the office chair). we have another scan. this time mary smiles. the baby's heart is still beating. we go home. the bleeding comes and goes. it is not what is known as spotting. it is more pouring. but this time the baby stays. at 7 months and a bit he decides he has had enough waiting. with quite a lot of drama and trauma and fear, my son is born. it takes me a very long time to get over all the fear and believe that he will live.

i am 39. we have an airedale terrier, the sort of dog you push around one wheels when you are small. she would more properly be called an airedale terror as she is wild. one day we get home and she has jumped up at the glass doors, going straight through the glass and cutting her front legs and shoulders to ribbons. i ring the vet. as the bleeding has slowed they say to bring her in in a couple of hours so they can stitch her up. i make her comfortable in the bedroom. the wounds are raw flesh. it seems wrong for her to be open to the air like this, but i know she is better waiting for the operating theatre at home rather than in an unfamiliar place. she needs 48 stitches in all.

i am 41. i am at work when i get a phone call. it is our neighbour the builder, who mike is doing casual work for. there has been an accident. mike is on the way to worthing hospital in an ambulance. i run out of the office, shouting to my colleagues. i jump into my car and bang the door so hard the handle comes off. i drive to the hospital very fast. i get there before the ambulance. this terrifies me. the only reason i can think of that i would have got there first is that he has died so they are no longer hurrying. the ambulance arrives and mike is carried in. his clothes are covered in blood and his arm is wrapped in a huge bloodstained pad. we are taken to a cubicle. t he doctor pulls the pad back to have a look. it is like meat and my legs buckle. i am far more shocked than mike is. he is making jokes. he is x-rayed as the cut may have gone through the bone. it turns out that he was pulling down the wall of a shower cubicle when it sheared along the join of the plasterboard and the edge of the broken tiles cut deep into mike's arm. carl, the neighbour, tells me the bathroom was like the shower scene from psycho. his tool box was full of blood. mike tells me that if he hadn't moved his head the tiles would have gone into his skull. i don't want to think about this. as mike's kidneys are not stable they cannot operate for 2 days. he has the arm bandaged up but i can't help thinking it is meat under there. we don't know if his arm will work again. it has cut right through the muscle and most of the nerves. i go to get our son from school and then a friend comes to sit with him so i can go back to the hospital. as i drive i think we will have to get an automatic car. that night and the next i don't bath, i sleep in my clothes with the dog on the bed. the house becomes a tip. we look like we have been burgled. my son and i eat rice and cheese, our comfort food. we go to see mike in hospital. the man in the next bed has a drain into a bag. our son watches the blood drip into the bag.

i am 42. i am up on the downs with our lurcher. he runs across a field and when he comes back i notice he has cut his foot and that it is dripping. i tie it up with a plastic bag and ring my husband to meet me at the car park with a first aid kit. we bandage up the dog and i take him to the vet. as it is sunday we have to ring the vet first. it turns out the dog has cut an artery in his leg. the vet stitches him up and gives him a blood transfusion from her own dog. i marvel at this. he is soon better.

i am 42. since my son was born i have bled more and more with each period. it is called flooding. it is likely that i will have to have a hysterectomy. one day my son and i go to a garden centre. i go to the loo and change my tampon and pads. we drive up the road and i feel the blood pouring onto the car seat. we pull over in a lay-by and i mop up as best as i can and put in another duvet-sized pad. my son watches in interest. i ponder on the effect that this will have on him - he will never be squeamish about periods around the women he knows. our wonderful gp ( a new one as we have moved) puts a tiny coil inside me a few days later and the whole thing stops. it is pure magic. i can keep my womb.

i am 43. my husband is out with our dogs. i have a soak in the bath. my son is playing on his computer. it is a lovely warm day. i wander round the house, feeling calm and good. the phone rings. it is someone i don't know. he says that he has found a dog with our phone number on it. it has been in an accident. i am confused and start to say that our dogs are with my husband but i realise something has happened. i find out where the man is and pull on some clothes. my son picks up the urgency and we run out to the car. it is my husbands car as he has mine. we screech off to the place where the man said the dog was. on the way i ring the vet and alert them so they can meet us at the surgery. as we get out of the car we see our beautiful lurcher lying panting in a huge pool of blood. it seems impossible that so much blood can fit into such a thin dog. there are other people there; an old man who was driving the car that hit the dog, and a couple with a bmw, as well as the man who phoned. i tell the couple that my son is autistic and ask them to watch him with the road. i tell my son to look at a particular tree and not to look away until i tell him. the man and i roll the dog onto a picnic rug and into the back seat of my husband's car. the man says i can keep it - he is part of a family with a local pet shop and they get them free from the manufacturers. i tell my son to get in the car and we race off to the vets. the vet is there and we carry the dog in. he is still bleeding but more slowly. i tell my son to look at a lab coat on the wall and not to look away. the vet tells me to press on the wound. she is working on the dog. when we have the bleeding under control she rings the other vet who comes in. they tell us to come back when they ring us. i am shaking like a leaf. i am so proud of my son. when we get home we cannot find my husband. his phone is at home. our neighbour goes out to look for him. eventually he comes home - he has been looking for the dog. it turns out the dog has chased a deer over a mile to where he was run over. when we bring him home he is very weak. it is touch and go for several days. i sleep on the floor with him the first night, holding his paw so he knows i am there.

i am 44. one day my sister is staying over and we all plan to go swimming. we take the dog in the car to give him a walk on the way. we all climb out of the car and let him off the lead in the woods. almost immediately my son falls over and cuts his hand. he is screaming with fear at the sight of his own blood. we try to calm him. just then a huge stag bolts past us and over into a ploughed field the other side of the road. it is followed by our dog at full speed. we watch in horror as our dog brings down the stag, tearing out its throat. it is in slow motion. the stag runs across the field, bleeding, the dog catches it again and brings it down. we can see it from a distance. my husband is trying to calm our son down - he is hysterical at the sight of his blood. my sister tells me to stay with my son and runs over the field to where the stag is now on the ground. we can see the dog going at it. my sister stops near the dog and the stag and throws up. she grabs the dog's collar and pulls him off. he keeps trying to get at the stag. my sister throws up again. she staggers back across the ploughed field with the blood-soaked dog. the stag drags itself into the woods. the dog has cut his front leg and is bleeding badly. my sister alternates between crying and shouting at the dog. we all get in the car. we drive round trying to find the stag. then we start on the way to the vets. i ring the rspca to see if they can come and put the stag down, and the vet to arrange for them to be there as it is a sunday. my son wails that he thought we were going swimming. as my sister and i wait in the vet's waiting room we see that the bone in the dog's leg is exposed. my sister rushes to be sick again.

i am 46. my work takes me into some grim places. they are the homes of people who have fallen to drugs. sometimes they are in prison, sometimes they have run away. sometime they have been moved to places of safety. sometimes they are dead. my camera is one of the tools of my trade. it records these places, to show to the judge. i hide behind it, seeing the world one step removed. somehow it makes these places more bearable. but when i get back to the office and look at the pictures on the screen, they are larger than life. images that sum up more than anything the depravity of people's lives. a blood-stained hammer, a bullwhip and a thong, all in a pool of blood which has dried to rust. a champagne bucket, full of sharp knives, soaking in water with congealed blood floating on it, in a kitchen where no-one has cooked anything except crack for a very long time. a barbie doll, face down on a blood-stained floor. blood-soaked pillows in a house where a 15 year old boy cut his own throat in despair. so much blood, leaking out, like tears.

i am 48. things have been tough. for some reason this seems like a good time to adopt another dog. i locate a female lurcher who needs a home and drive down to devon to fetch her. when our lurcher meets her he is aggressive. she is very smelly and it is probably this which causes it. on a walk a few days later he snaps at her and she snaps back. we do not notice at the time but she has broken the skin. by christmas he is very ill. we put him on anti-biotics and painkillers and he perks up a bit. after christmas he has to have an operation. he comes home in a blood-soaked t-shirt to catch the drips from the drain that is in the wound. i swap his fleecy blanket for a cheap duvet covered with a red sheet to hide the blood. the wound doesn't heal well and he has to have a second, more major operation. there is a bigger drain and a lot more blood. i ring my friend, a doctor, to see how much blood there should be. she says it doesn't sound like too much but that i should ring the vet if he seems weak or pale. days go by and the wound carries on leaking, but more slowly. it doesn't heal and the vet says he may have to go to a vetarinary hospital for plastic surgery. one afternoon the dog scratches his shoulder and opens up the wound again. it gapes but does not bleed much. the vet staples him up with metal staples. we are expecting the worst and begin to research places to stay in newmarket, where the vet hospital is. but a miracle happens and the wound heals. not totally, but enough to feel hopeful that it will all be ok. i put his fleecy blanket back on his bed and throw away the red sheet.

a long gap

2008-02-01T05:28:00.000Z

i haven't written here for a while. life has been tough lately and i haven't had much energy for introspection. but today i was talking with someone about links between stuff now and stuff in the past and how they need to be examined before they can be put away in the right place in your head. and my head certainly needs a good tidy up.

so i'm going to try and write here again. but first i need a cup of tea...

dreams (2)

2007-09-30T21:59:00.000Z

i am in the process of moving out of the family home. i am packing stuff up. it is taking ages. there is some problem with the flat i am moving into. i keep trying to get hold of the landlord to see when it is free. he is a friend of my stepmum's. the family home is messy and full of clutter. i still share a room with my sisters. i am getting all my stuff together but keep getting distracted by looking a things. i am putting certain things into a box file to take away with me. i am about to go away on a trip. it turns out later that i am going to russia for some sort of civic visit.

i find my winston churchill medal and put that in the box. i also find a badge that has a cut-out of the trans-siberian railway with a little map showing places like novosibursk, that i bought last time i was in russia. i put this in the box. it seems i am to meet some dignitaries and i want to wear these things on my coat. i find a large wadge of typed papers which is something i have written. it has editing notes all over it and needs sorting out. i try and take out what i need to take but then decide to sort it out later and put the whole lot in.

eventually i have cleared most of my bit of the room. i go into the living room/kitchen and make a phone call to the landlord. finally the flat is ready. i go back into the bedroom and pick up the last few things and move my bed so the others an re-arrange the room. i go down to a utility area which is below the kitchen and put a few things i am not taking there. my stepmum comes down and gives me a hug. she gives me something special to take (i forget this bit already but i think maybe a piece of jewellery or something - not a large item but a special one). i get my keys and say good bye to everyone.

i walk through the city towards the bus station. (i think there was a bit here about getting on a bus and then it being the wrong one but i have forgotten this bit) i start to join a queue for a taxi. there is a market going on and a food stall. it turns out the queue i am in is for the food stall and not the taxis. the people preparing the food are up higher than the customers, on a platform behind the counter. i ask the man who is selling the food where i can find a taxi and he points crossly to the row of taxis. they are black cabs. i go over but all the cab drivers are eating and are not for hire. one points to where the taxi rank is.

i go over there and as i reach it i see a long queue. i join the back feeling exhausted. eventually i get to the new flat. i go in through the basement entrance. my husband is there already and shows me in. the room is scruffy and basic but ok. mike is not going to be living here with me but has come for the night. i start to put my stuff down. he shows me the rest of the flat - through a hallway there is a large living room with french windows out onto a leafy garden, then a bedroom and a kitchen. it is all very scruffy but homely. mike goes out to get something from the shops and i wander around. the kitchen is painted in nice rich colours, the gloss is dark and the walls are bright. there is vinyl on the floor which has a lovely pattern on it but has big tears in it which would trip someone up. i decide when i get back from russia i will buy rugs to cover the tears.

just then i see a cat in the garden. it is a tabby cat. my dog (who has appeared but was not with me in the taxi) is looking fixedly out of the window.i know he will suddenly leap at the cat and may break the glass. i notice there is also a cat inside the room. its a ginger cat which is sitting calmly looking at my dog. he roars at the cat in the garden and bashes into the window. just then the ginger cat makes a huge leap and lands on my dog's back, digging its claws in hard. he squeals and runs around. i manage to get the cat off and bundle it out into the garden, holding my dog's collar to stop him going out. i shut the door. my dog has beads of blood coming through his coat. he is quite badly cut and i decide i need to get him to the vet for a jab and anti-biotics as cat scratches go mouldy easily.

then i am going to bed. at this point i am alone. the bedroom has two small zed beds made up in it. my box of things to take to russia is under mine. i want the window open but it is the ground floor and i am nervous. (usually i would not be because of my dog - i am not sure if he is still in the dream at this point or if i think because he is ill he won't protect me) i play around with the window. it is flimsy and has a sliding pane with some flimsy bolts. i secure it as best i can. i get into bed.

then my husband is in the other bed. we are both covered by pretty flimsy quilts. i say "its a good job i booked the flight for tomorrow and not today, i am shattered". we chat a bit then go to sleep.

dreams (1)

2007-09-30T21:54:00.001Z

i am in a modern, fairly ugly, pretentious house. it is large, furnished in a cluttered but expensive way. it is dirty and dusty and cobwebby. the woman of the house has a son with special needs and two older children. there is also a grandmother who is there most of the time. she is kindly but scatty. the woman has employed me to clean for her. her last cleaner left. she has taken me on for 2 hours a week.

when i turn up for the first week it is immediately clear that 2 hours will not make a dent in the dust. more will be needed. the grandmother shows me to the main bedroom where i am going to start. the mother is at work and the younger child is at school. the older daughter is somewhere else in the house. the bedroom is a mess. the curtains are drawn and i open them. there is one large bed and one medium one. on top of the beds are new sheets ready for the beds to be made. i notice that, although the smaller of the beds is made up in the traditional way, the larger bed is made up as 2 horizontal single beds, with odd soft toys in one. the room is furnished like an hotel but with modern faded style. brown wall paper and dust everywhere.

i strip the beds and find that one of the mattress buttons has come off. they are made of fancy bone like duffle coat toggles. i go down to the kitchen and ask the grandmother for a needle and thread to sew it back on. i take back up some pledge and jif and cloths. i make a start on cleaning the room but it becomes clear it will take a long time. there is dust everywhere. i hear the mother coming home and go down. i say that it is clear that 2 hours a week is not enough time to make a dent in the dust. it needs a spring clean which will take a couple of days and then 4 hours a week to keep on top of it. she says the previous cleaner only came for 2 hours and i point out that the previous one left. i say we will give it a try and if it doesn't work out then i can always leave. i go back up to the bathroom and squirt jif on the bath. i scrub it around and then leave it to work. i go back to the bedroom. the daughter has re-made the beds using the old sheets, roughly. she is in the smaller of the beds. i say i was going to change the sheets and that the new sheets had been left out by her mother. at this point the mother comes in and bustles around the room, changing her clothes and going into the en suite shower room. she is rushing to get somewhere. i start dusting the top of a bureau. it has large ornaments, some african heads and big candles. behind everything is more dust.

when i go down to the kitchen again the grandmother has lined up a lot of large items of furniture - tables, desks, good quality oak stuff but huge. she says these are for me. i say i probably don't have room even though they are lovely but as i say this i am looking at one large table and thinking how lovely it is. then i remember that our table was made for us my my husbands brother for a wedding present and there is no way we can replace it with another one. i say i will find homes for the furniture. it is hard to get across the kitchen to the back door there is so much furniture. i get out into the fresh air with a feeling of relief.

the condom

2007-09-19T20:34:00.000Z

i am standing in the doorway of the living-room. i am 14. it is dark outside; the room is lit by table lamps. my father is pointing towards the fireplace. it is a hideous fireplace; portland stone, built by the previous owner. it has a rough stone hearth on which, incongruously, is some bedlinen.

"what do you call that?" he shouts, bright red and shaking. he is pointing at the sheets.

"sheets?" i venture.

"don't you dare take the piss!" he shouts, louder. dealing with this sort of situation is delicate; too lippy and he will lay into me, not assertive enough and i will be considered guilty.

i take a step towards the sheets. then all becomes clear. among them is a condom. it appears to be used. i know it is not anything to do with me. whilst both my sister, who is a year younger than me, and i are both sexually active, i favour bareback riding. i do not indulge in any form of contraception until my 16th birthday, when my step-mum marches me along to the family planning clinic in my school uniform and demands that i am put on the pill. but this is yet to come. so i look at the condom, trying to think of something to say. i know it must be my sister's, or more accurately, her boyfriend's.

we are both going out with soldiers. mine is called alan and hers is called andy, a matching pair. my sister and i share a room and sleep in bunk beds. with the abandon of youth we think nothing of each bedding our respective soldier in our respective bunk. our parents do not know they are in the house. we sneak them in when they are watching telly, and they leave before the house is awake.

my father is still waiting. i realise that the condom must date from the previous weekend. i insist i know nothing about it. i refuse to grass up my sister. she is not subjected to the same inquisition. they assume she is too young to know about condoms. little do they know she is more sensible than me.

ron

2007-07-22T15:25:00.000Z

last night i received a phone call from gaynor. i met gaynor at my mum's funeral. she is the daughter of ron, the man who befriended my mum and looked after her in her last years as she descended into dementia. gaynor told me that ron has died, aged 88, having himself suffered from alzheimers for some years.

i first met ron when my sister and i went up to swansea to see my mum. she had a flat on a council estate that was known to be tough. we travelled up to wales in a bizarre car that my sister had at the time. it was a bright orange reliant kitten which is the same as a reliant robin, but has the advantage of having 4 wheels. i drove and my sister lay down in the back. 80 mph in a plastic box was too much for her.

when we got to my mum's flat there was no-one there. we were a bit worried as my mum had already begun to be a bit vague. then her neighbour put her head over the hedge and said "she's at ron's". my sister and i turned to each other and at the same time said "who the f*** is ron?"

we went round to the house the neighbour had pointed out. it was scruffy compared to the others and had the original windows. the council had replaced the others. the door was answered by a man with brown eyes and bristly hair like a brush. we introduced ourselves and he showed us in. my mum was there in a chair, looking quite well. she had put on weight. ron insisted we had a meal and we sat and chatted. it became clear that mum lived with ron. we were not sure whether as a couple or as friends. she seemed very happy either way.

the plan had been to stay at mums flat. ron's house was not big enough and it was pretty grubby. i think my sister and i stayed in mum's flat but i can't remember.

ron was mad on religion. completely obsessed. if you spoke to him about anything he would turn the subject to religion in one or two sentences. he attended the corrugated iron chapel up the road. it had barbed wire all over it and, even for my mum's estate had a lot of security. it seemed funny my atheist mum ending up with someone who spoke of nothing but god. now and again mum would say "don't be silly, ron!" in a gentle way but mostly she just let him go on. she loved to listen to him reading the bible aloud. ron had a melodious welsh voice that could have made the instructions for kit furniture sound lovely.

ron had been in the navy and then had been a miner. he had worked as a hospital porter in later life, in the hospital where his mother, and later my mother had gone, a huge former asylum on a hill above swansea.

ron had been adamant that he would look after my mum in his home until she died. he managed valiantly for a long time but things got more and more dangerous. mum started throwing stuff into the open fire when ron wasn't in the room. she started hitting him. one day when we had a meeting with the social worker at ron's house my mum was hitting everyone except me. it was almost as though she knew it was me, even though she had ceased to recognise anyone. she never hit me in my life.

in the end i had to get mum sectioned. the ambulance came with the police to take her away. i could have gone to swansea when it was happening but i simply couldn't bear it.

ron visited mum in hospital every day. he cooked her meals and helped the staff look after her. when we went to visit her the staff spoke fondly of ron, and how devoted to mum he was. we used to go and see him at his house after we saw mum and he always seemed like he had a bit of him missing.

it was not until i met ron's daughter gaynor at my mum's funeral that i heard the full story of ron's life. it seemed he had been an alcoholic and had been violent and aggressive. when gaynor was a teenager he had found religion and had given up drinking. he had embraced god in an equally addictive way. when gaynor was 17 her mother had killed herself. gaynor went to live with her grandmother and then got a job as a live-in nanny on a farm on the gower. for years she hardly saw ron. she blamed him for her mother's death.

at my mum's funeral ron wanted to do a reading. gaynor persuaded him to let her husband tony read it for him. this was a good idea as ron would have started preaching a sermon and would have been impossible to stop.

i hope he has now found peace.

reactions

2007-06-01T10:29:00.000Z

something i read in someone else's blog made me want to write about this.

when i was a kid i lived in a flat. we were on the middle floor of 3. downstairs were a couple call mr and mrs dobby. he was a tailor and had a built up shoe on one side where his leg was a lot shorter. above us was a woman called mummy lucy and her son per who would have been about 15. i used to wander down to the dobby's flat and they would give me bourbon biscuits and white bread and butter. their flat was immaculate, with doilies on the plates and net curtains. mummy lucy's flat was dark and chaotic and not all that clean. she was a big woman with a fruity sort of voice, quite posh for our estate.

at the back was an enclosed garden shared by all the flats. there were rotary clothes lines and dustbins. there were a row of brick sheds. my dad kept his motorbike in ours. alongside the block was a path which led to a gate into the front. this was so the binmen could get in to empty the bins.

the whole garden was overlooked by the flats on two sides. the only bits that were not were the bin room and the path down the side.

one day i was playing on the lawn. i would have been about 6. per from upstairs came and asked me if i would help him with his homework. this sounded important so i said yes. he took me round to the path at the side. he had some plasticine. he said he had to make moulds of things. we started by doing moulds of the bricks on the wall. then we did other things, like keyholes. then he said that his biology homework was to do moulds of bits of bodies. he pulled down my knickers and made several moulds of my fanny in plasticine. i was not very comfortable with this but i didn't like to say so.

at some point my mum called me for tea. when i went up to the flat i told my mum and dad that i had been helping per with his homework. my mum asked about it and i explained about the plasticine and about the biology homework.

my dad jumped up from the table and went red. "i'll kill him!" he shouted. my mum asked me to get some milk from the larder. when i came back into the room my dad was sitting back down. my mum told me she would speak to mummy lucy and explain that per had to do his homework on his own. she said that if he asked me to help again or asked me any other things that were not comfortable i should tell her and she would speak to mummy lucy.

later my mum went upstairs. my dad and i watched telly. when mum came down she said that mummy lucy had been very helpful and that per would do his homework indoors from now on.

at the time this event did not register as anything very major. my dad was always losing his temper. looking back i realise that the way my mum dealt with it taught me an important lesson. if things happened that i didn't like i could tell her and she would make them stop.

i think if my dad had run upstairs and beaten per up it would have horrified me. i would probably never have told anyone about that sort of stuff ever again.

same old same old

2007-05-07T20:47:00.000Z

we have just got back from a visit to my dad and his wife. this is his third wife so i don't call her my step mum. his second wife, who brought me up, is my step mum.

my dad looked better than he did last time. he is 80 years old and for someone who spent a large part of his life trying to end it, he has survived remarkably well.

his wife was in something of a state. as soon as we could get a moment away she told me that, when she had gone to see her grandchildren, my dad had rung a woman they know and asked her round. this woman was a friend of my dad's wife so rather than going round she had told my dad to act his age and told my dad's wife what had happened. my dad's wife had told him he was below contempt and that she would divorce him. to which, true to form, he had said that she was having an affair and that this justified what he had done. his evidence for the affair was that when he was in hospital last, having had a stroke, he had seen her emerging from behind the curtains crying, with a doctor.

my dad also said that, if she did divorce him he would kill himself. regular readers will know my dad's history. my dad's wife said that if he killed himself she would not come to his funeral and neither would i. she may have been wrong here. i might just have had enough of covering up for my parents and might just be tempted to go along and let rip.

anyway, she has not divorced him and he has so far not killed himself. i had thought the times of dreading the phone ringing had maybe subsided. but maybe they haven't. however i am a lot tougher now and i have other priorities. at the end of the day i have never been important enough to stop my dad killing himself and i doubt that much has changed.

so i wait and see...

june

2007-05-05T07:17:00.000Z

on thursday i went to a funeral. it was my oldest friend's mum. my friend and i have known each other since we were 12. we have been through the mill together. through our terrible wild teens, with her anorexia and my depression, through my dad's suicide attempts. through her mum leaving and expecting my friend to look after her younger siblings and her devastated dad. her son was the first baby i ever held in my life. my friend was there when my son was born. so we are close.

i haven't been back there since my friend left home at 17. there are out of town shopping centres and ring roads and it took ages find the council estate where my friend grew up. but her nan's house has the same things in it that i remembered. my friend's sister lives next door to her with her 3 kids.

my friend's mum was a gypsy. the funeral was a proper gypsy funeral with black horses with plumes and a glass carriage to carry the coffin through the village to the church. everyone who could walk walked behind the carriage. my friend's daughters in full-length gothic black lace dresses walked with my friend and her husband. my friend's brother, whose health has not been the same since he fell off scaffolding after taking speed and hit his head, which led to a downward spiral into epilepsy and drink and drugs and pain, still managed to walk with the carriage.

my friend's son is a bit wobbly on his legs so he went in one of the cars with my friend's grief-stricken nan, should never have had to bury her own daughter. my friend's dad, who was left with the children and the shock and the shame, but who never stopped loving this woman, went in the car with them.

the village ground to a halt as we walked past. the men digging the roads switched off their drills. a party of school children stood in awed silence. the horses shied a bit at an oil tanker that had stopped. my friend's mum would have loved it all - bringing things to a halt and being the centre of attention.

the service was in the village church. it was all the same as i remembered. the old yew tree with branches that have rooted and made a cave under its skirts was still there. we stood while the coffin, with its flowers saying "sister" and "mum" was lifted onto the shoulders of the men in top hats and taken into the church.

june's oldest brother read a piece. then the vicar read the eulogy which my friend had written. the church echoed with wracking sobs. i was probably the only person not crying. the readings told the story of a woman who had put her family first, who lived for them. my friend had made her peace with her mum.

but i remembered a different side to this complex woman. someone who had kept my friend so short of food when she was a little girl that she had to steal bread and which eventually meant that she developed rickets. someone who made my friend do all the housework while she went to bingo. someone who thought that the way to justify leaving the family was to tell my friend that the man she was running away with was my friend's biological father and her true love. this news devastated my friend, who had always thought the man who brought her up was her father. she developed crippling panic attacks and anorexia.

the man who her mum thought was her true love turned out to be a nasty piece of work who left her tied to the bed in his house one weekend, with no water and no way of escaping. so her mum told my friend that a different man was actually her father. now i am older i wonder how anyone could be this confused about something so major. but her mum was only 16, and no doubt wild.

as i sat in the church, looking around at the faces of the people, i wondered how many of them had memories like this. june took a lot of secrets to her grave with her. but i think the paternity of my friend is not in any doubt. now she is older you can see that the man who brought her up is her biological father. the family resemblance is very strong. it echoed round the church in the grieving faces.

we walked back through the village to the graveyard. it is high on a hill, away from the river. an avenue of horse chestnuts shone against the perfect blue sky. the awful moment when the coffin was put in the grave came. my friend's nan had to be held up as she was near collapse. the family threw roses into the grave. i was given a rose too. i have been around so long i suppose i am almost family at times like this.

we walked back to my friend's nan's house. there was food for an army. my friend's mum would always be able to calculate how many bridge rolls for a particular number of people. it was a skill that used to amaze me. there was a picture of june among the food. it was as i remembered her when i first met her, smiling, shining. before bad decisions took her away from her children.

june was a member of mensa. she could calculate accumulator bets at the bookies faster than the counter staff. she loved bingo. she was lively and fun. my friend undoubtedly inherited her intellect and her spark. my friend's life has been tough but she still survives. and laughs. and reads palms. this is the legacy june gave her.

birthdays

2007-04-29T07:12:00.000Z

yesterday we had a birthday party. my husband and i are both april birthdays so we thought we would have a joint one. we shared it with two friends who are also april babes; one of them is autistic and has never had a party because she never had enough friends to invite, the other hasn't celebrated her birthday since her twin sister died 5 years ago.

it was the usual hectic day when you have a party, rushing about tidying and cooking. getting ready was fun. my friend painted my toenails, and her boyfriend put hairgel in my hair. my husband put my jewellery on for me. i felt like a princess with all the attention.

my dear friend jo made a cake. it was huge and beautiful and had all our names on it in icing. we all blew out the candles and everyone sang happy birthday. as i blew them out it struck me that the last time i had blown out candles on a birthday cake was when i was a child. it is not that i haven't celebrated birthdays, just that i have not had a cake.

my mum made me a chocolate cake on the last birthday i was with her. i had some friends round for tea. when my mum brought out the cake i blew out the candles. my mum went to get a knife but i dug in with my fingers and all my friends followed suit. i didn't think until it was too late but the lovely cake was a mess and my mum looked really disappointed. for many years chocolate cake made me cry.

when i lived with my dad and my stepmum i missed my mum particularly hard on birthdays. my stepmum understood this. one year, late at night on the day before my birthday she came in when i was lying awake and gave me two bottles of perfume as a present. she sat with me a while and we felt very close. we didn't always get on too well so this was really special.

yesterday felt like quite a milestone for all of us birthday people. it struck me that being able to celebrate your birthday is a big part of being comfortable in your skin and accepting yourself. i am lucky to have such good friends and such a brilliant family.

grandma

2007-04-09T04:59:00.000Z

lately my thoughts have been on death more than is usual. this must be because of the anniversary of my mum's death, followed by the anniversary of my friend's mum's death. my friend's mum's funeral was filmed so that people overseas could see it and on the anniversary of her death we watched the film. it showed a large family celebrating the life of a remarkable woman, cut to the quick by her absence.

when my grandma died i missed her funeral. grandma was my mum's mum and was an afrikaans-speaker who had been uprooted from cape town to follow her husband to his beloved north wales. she had 5 young children, one from her first marriage, and spoke no welsh. my mum's dad died not long afterwards, leaving grandma to try to feed her kids on national assistance. my mum remembered how the authorities would come round and if you had more chairs than members of the family they would take the extra ones away to sell.

my gran took in sewing and kept chickens and somehow managed to bring up her kids in what must have been a hostile and unfamiliar environment. to the end of her life she had a broad afrikaans accent. she was a tough woman, but kind and fair. i spent many school holidays at her house when my sisters went on holiday abroad with their dad. gran's house was called "gorfwysfa" which means "place of peace". it was a solid house built of slates blocks and looked out over a marsh. the marsh had mysterious blue lights at night from the gas. my cousins and i were scared to go too far into it because of quicksand.

we went back to north wales to sprinkle mum's ashes and tried to find the house. we drove all round the village but were unable to find either the house or the marsh. we stopped to ask some builders who were doing up a slate house and amazingly it was gran's house. where the marsh had been was a forest which was why i did not recognise it. it brought home how long ago it had been when i stayed there.

when gran died i had just had a miscarriage and was off work. my mum's twin sister rang me up. "grandma has died" she told me. i asked when the funeral would be. "we have already buried her" answered my aunt "we didn't think you would be able to make it because of being pregnant". i was shocked to the core. grandma had been one of the few stable things about my childhood. it felt as though i had been robbed of the chance to say goodbye. i told my aunt that in fact i was no longer pregnant but that even if i had been i would have been able to come to the funeral. i told her how shocked i was that i had not been told of grandma's death.

my aunt went on to say that my other aunt, who had arranged the funeral, thought that if i knew about it beforehand i might bring my mum. by this time my mum was demented and confused. my aunt had apparently been worried she might "make a scene or jump in the grave or something". so my mother never got the chance to say goodbye either.

i have not spoken to the aunt who organised the funeral since. my mum's twin is someone who would not have dared to go against her, but i am left feeling that she too betrayed me. the capacity of my family to make me feel utterly unimportant never ceases to amaze me.

call the police

2007-03-17T10:33:00.000Z

something i read reminded me of an occasion when everything was out of sync. when i was about 10 we lived in a small house which my stepmum rented from the hospital where she worked.

one weekend my stepmum was ironing in the living-room. the reason this sticks in my mind is that i don't remember her ironing much. she used to put things in the tumble drier and then fold them when they were hot so they didn't need ironing. my mum was due to come to collect me for an access visit. i think my dad was out. the front door went. we always used the back so we knew it was a visitor. on the doorstep was my mum and a policeman. they came into the tiny living-room. i was told to get my stuff and when i came down i went off with my mum and the policeman. i have no recollection of where we went for that particular access visit. no-one explained why the policeman was there. i wondered if my mum was in trouble.

years later my mum told me what this had all been about. after i had gone to live with my dad and stepmum my mum had gone to live in scotland. she was at a residential college called newbattle abbey where she was studying english for o level. my dad had apparently said that she could not take me for access visits in case she removed me from the jurisdiction (scotland is a separate legal jurisdiction to england and wales). i assume she had got a court order and the policeman was there to enforce it if need be.

this all seems like yet more games by my dad. my mum had never contested him having custody and indeed had not attended the custody hearing. my stepmum told me mum had written a letter to the judge saying my dad was a good man. so the likelihood of her taking me away was nil. the policeman seemed quite friendly but it must have been an unusual job for him.

death

2007-03-15T06:14:00.000Z

tomorrow is the anniversary of my mum's death. she died in 2000 from an embolism. she had suffered with alzheimers for many years and by the time she died she was just a shell. this is a picture of her i took the last time i saw her alive.

this will be the first anniversary of mum's death that i have marked on the actual day. it is not that i have not thought of her since, but i did not know what date she had died on. i was the person who registered her death and organised her funeral but i had to send the death certificate somewhere and did not get it back. i have a kind of number-blindness that makes dates impossible to remember unless i write them down. both my husband and i thought mum had died at the very beginning of april so around then i get a feeling of sadness but not on any particular day. more to do with which flowers are out in the garden and which birds are singing.

it was only when i was talking to my friend about the anniversary of her own mum's death that i realised i did not know the date mum died. i could remember it was a thursday. i could remember the phone call in the middle of the night from the hospital and how my teeth chattered but i didn't cry very much. how the following day we drove up to swansea and it was not until we got there and my son remarked that no-one had overtaken us the whole way that i realised how fast i had been driving. how the hospital wanted to do an autopsy because it was a sudden death and how i told them i would get a court order if they dared to try to cut my mum's body. but not the date.

i decided i would apply for a copy of the death certificate. you can get an express service from the registrar of deaths and something told me i should do this even though it cost more. it is just as well i did as mum died on 16 march rather than in april. if i had been more careful with money i would have missed it.

i wanted to mark mum's death in a more concrete way rather than just a general feeling of sadness. my friend suggested lighting a candle. mum would have liked this idea. as luck would have it my son went on a school trip last week to a museum and made a little candle. so this year i will light his special candle. next year i will buy a candle and keep it for remembering mum.

i will get the hang of all this eventually.

preconceptions

2007-03-15T05:38:00.000Z

once when i was a child i asked my dad why my mum didn't want me. "she never did," he replied, "i had to pretty much rape her to get her pregnant. she tried to get an abortion but she couldn't." i was quite young when my dad told me this but i was old enough to know what rape and abortion meant.

at the time i thought it was my dad being poisonous about my mum. in spite of him being the one who had left her for another woman on more than one occasion he somehow had re-written history to make himself the wronged party. i therefore put this piece of information in the back of my mind and tried not to dwell on it.

years later, on a visit to my mum, when we were walking in a park in swansea, on a sunny day with birds singing and all apparently being well with the world, i felt it was time to ask mum about what dad had said. i wish i hadn't. instead of denying it she said "well, i thought i had something wrong inside me that would make it all go wrong. i went to the doctor and he examined me and said everything was fine." my mum went on to tell me she had indeed tried to have a termination but that the doctor refused as she was married and settled. in the late 1950s things were different to today.

with the amazing self-protection that our minds are capable of, i turned this into a welcome piece of news. i reasoned that it was not me personally, the 8 year old me with the gap in her teeth and pretty eyes, that my mum did not want. it was any baby that she would have had. it was the whole idea of it all. somehow i managed to make myself feel better about being the product of non-consensual intercourse and an unsuccessful attempt to remove me from the world. the human mind is a truly amazing thing.

what happened later in my mum's pregnancy has an almost biblical feel to it. we had a balcony in our flat and my mum grew bright flowers in window boxes. she was planting flowers for the coming summer when she was about 7 months pregnant. she had been to the dentist to have a tooth removed a few days earlier. somehow bugs from the soil had got into her mouth. this rapidly turned into an infection that became osteomylitis - an infection in her jawbone.

she was taken into hospital and had to have major surgery to remove quite a large part of her jawbone. this left a huge scar across her jaw. she was given large doses of penicillin (i am allergic to penicillin although i am told it doesn't cross the placenta so this may just be co-incidence). by the time i remember her she had had plastic surgery on the scar so it was invisible under the jawbone (it re-appeared when she was old as her skin sagged). for someone as beautiful as my mum this must have been horrific. the fact it was her jaw seems to have significance over and above the illness and the disfigurement. it is almost as though she was being silenced.

a eulogy (part 2)

2007-03-04T16:16:00.000Z

this is what i actually said at my mum's funeral:

thank you for coming to say goodbye to mum.

she was a person who it is difficult to describe

above all an individual

she could be infuriating and opinionated

but she was kind, witty

an articulate woman with a thirst for knowledge

she loved music, books, art and philosophy

she was an accomplished painter, a clever seamstress and an inventive cook

she placed great importance on honesty and integrity and held firm beliefs about social justice

the awful illness she suffered in recent years masked her vibrant character

but we must try to remember her as she once was.

motel

2007-02-27T18:17:00.000Z

something that my childhood has left me with is the desire to make everything ok for people. when i can't it really distresses me. i think i am a sort of compulsive rescuer. i think the root of this is from feeling like i had to look after my parents. neither of them behaved like a grown up. i remember a general feeling of anxiety a lot of the time.

i was particularly anxious when i went on access visits to my mum. things were not always cosy and comfy where she lived; she was very broke and lived in a variety of bedsits and hostels. they tended to have shared bathrooms which weren't all that nice.

on one access visit my mum took me to a motel. this was unusual both because she had so little money and because she did not have a car. the motel was in ascot which is a very posh area. we got the train there and walked from the station. because it was a motel the designers had not allowed for people arriving on foot. we walked up the drive through thick rhododendrons. we had to walk in the road as there was no pavement. my mum got the keys and we went to the chalet where we were going to stay. it had its own little bathroom and was really nice.

during the afternoon my mum drew the curtains. it was still light. as it got dark i went to put the light on so i could read. my mum said we shouldn't. "if we put the light on people going past might think we are having a party and try to get in" she said.

at the time this struck me as strange but i had never been to a motel before. i did not know what to expect. every time cars went past and the lights rolled across the wall my mum would look scared. i put my arms round her and comforted her. i told her if anyone tried to get in i would fight them. we sat in the dark all evening. it seemed a really long evening and we went to bed early. the next day we left without breakfast.

looking back i think my mum might have been ill. more likely was that she was being pursued by her current boyfriend. her boyfriends were difficult characters and often they were violent.
i would have been about 11 when this happened. to this day i cannot bear seeing daylight through curtains in the early evening. i leave it until it is really dark to pull them closed.

on being a mum

2007-02-19T00:02:00.000Z

this is a comment i wrote on someone else's blog:

my son has always accepted that he has a mum who has a life around him, whether in my work as a lawyer or when i'm knocking down walls and doing up the house.

i am the mum who used to sit him in the back of the car with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon if i forgot to get his tea before we had to rush out. i am the mum who never irons his clothes. i am the mum who has to set up an e-mail reminder for his cookery ingredients and who even then has to write in his message book that the dog ate the cheese.

but i am the mum who fought to get him into a special school, who has never told him a single lie in his 12 years, who explains everything from gender dysmorphia to chrystal meth when he asks.

he knows that he is the main focus of all my endevours, and that i will fight with every breath in my body to protect him and champion him and make his life better wherever i can.

it took me years to work out how to be a mother. there were a number of reasons why it took so long, but a big one was the crazy messages that society gave out about what a proper mum was all about - a model which i could never fit into in a million years. but i'm his mum, the only one he will ever have and he seems pretty happy with that, which is all that matters in the end.

polo neck

2007-02-11T23:22:00.000Z

one of the things that gets to me is when people i come across at work assume that i have no knowledge of bad things. i am a lawyer and opposing lawyers often try to make me feel guilty because their client has been a victim of violence. these lawyers try to say that this in some way excuses what their client is dishing out to other people. i cannot say that i know more than they think because it would not be professional. in my mind it is not professional to try to guilt trip your opponent either but i can't do anything about it so i just have to keep my mouth shut.

this picture is of me in a polo neck. i have always liked polo necks. when i was young it was because of a character in a tv show called emma peel who drove an e-type jag and wore a polo neck. now it is because i have a double chin. when i was a young woman it was because it hid the bruises.

one problem that hangs over you if you were hit as a child is that it seems normal. when you start to meet men you find that the ones you are attracted to are those who are exciting. exciting often equals violent. so you get hit some more. my second long relationship was with an artist. he was pretty dramatic and clever and volatile. our neuroses interlocked in a way that at the time i thought meant he really understood me. now i know that what this meant was that he really understood how to hurt me, both emotionally and physically.

the other night my friend pretended to strangle me when i said something annoying. she wasn't to know but it was one of those rubber-band moments, when you shoot back to another place in your life. that place was when the artist tried to strangle me. he also hit me in the throat. maybe he wanted me to shut up and stop me shouting at him. it nearly worked. i had to speak at a conference the next day. this was in june or july, in really hot weather. i had a swollen, bruised throat so i had to wear a polo neck. i was sweating like a pig. i was so embarassed.

i later found out that one of the other speakers, who was a well known barrister and writer, had an equally violent partner. i wish i had known. we could have laughed about it in that way people do when there is nothing you can say.

my desk

2007-02-05T19:48:00.000Z

this is my desk. it is my little corner of the house. i am a bit possessive about it. i resent people just sitting down to use it without asking.

i bought this desk when i was a student. i left home to go to college. this desk was in a local second hand shop. i could not afford it at all but the minute is saw it i had to buy it. i spent ages sanding it down and varnishing it. i took the fold-down lid off and took it to a shop where they put on new green leather with gold squiggles round the edge.

when i was 10 or 11 i had a desk like this. my dad and my step-mum bought one for each of us. they were in the living room. we used to do our homework at them. mine was also a stable for the model horses i played with. the little dividers for envelopes and letters made perfect stalls for the horses.

one day my desk got broken. i cannot even remember what started it. i must have said something to my dad that he took as rude, or cheeky. suddenly he hit me really hard round the head. he didn't hit me often but when he did it was with the full force of a grown man in a rage. for years i would jump if anyone moved suddenly near my head. i fell across the room and landed on the lid of my desk. the hinges broke and the lid was hanging down.

i was terrified and ran upstairs into the room i shared with my sisters. i shut the door. my dad was outside trying to open it but it caught on the rug. i thought he was going to smash it down. i was screaming that the door was stuck. i think my stepmum came up - somehow things calmed down.

i suppose my dad must have fixed my desk. i can't remember. but when i saw the desk in my picture i had to buy it. no-one will break this one.

my rug

2007-01-25T22:22:00.000Z

this is a rug i have in my bedroom. i have had it everywhere i have lived since i was a kid. it is very special to me.

when i was about 7 my mum decided to decorate my bedroom. we lived in a flat which we rented from the corporation. we were the first tenants and the walls had been painted before we moved in but it was a bit bleak. my mum decided to make it nicer so she papered the walls with paper that had the texture of bamboo, made a bedcover with satin in a rusty reddy orange colour with piping round the edge, bought a lovely little light that was fitted to the wall and was switched on and off with a cord, and bought this rug.

i was so pleased with my new room. i felt like a film star. the silky bedcover was wonderful. i used to lie in bed just looking at it all. i kept it really tidy and put everything away so it was perfect.

one day i got home from school and it was all ruined. everywhere were clothes, make-up, bedding, piles of things. it was my mum's stuff. my dad had put a lock on the door of their bedroom and thrown everything belonging to my mum out. he later told me that he had been to a solicitor who had advised him to do this. it was no ordinary lock. it was one of those with a long thin key and the keyhole was small and round. this somehow made it seem sinister to me. it was not like normal locks but more like something you would find in a bank. the doors in the flat were pretty much made of cardboard so this was complete overkill. even i could have kicked the door in. it was more to make a point.

to my eternal shame i was horrible to my mum about her stuff messing up my room. the room that she had worked so hard to make lovely for me. i moaned about the make-up and the clothes. i moaned that her sleeping on my floor was wrong and that it was my room and that i shouldn't have to share it.

the only comfort i have is that my son would never behave like this. he is kind beyond belief to people in distress. he would give up his own bed rather than let me sleep on the floor.

somewhere inside me is the thought that things like this contributed to my mum giving me up.

sitting on mum's lap (2)

2007-01-05T12:46:00.000Z

this picture was taken when my son was about 8 months old. it is at my mum's friend ron's house. by this time my mum had alzheimers and was living with ron. this was the first time she had seen my son. how she held him was completely instinctive. i was scared she would drop him but the minute she had him in her arms i knew she would not. she kept saying "isn't she lovely!" it seemed to us that she thought she was holding me when i was a baby.

i see contrasts between this picture and the earlier one. in this one my son is the one who looks removed from things and my mum who is smiling. my mum looks anything but glamourous. in reality she was really smelly and dirty. by this time she was incontinent and it was very hard for ron to bath her. her nails were filthy, when they had always been manicured and polished with stuff called carnate polish, which came in a little tub and had an amazing smell like bubble gum. her dress is another jewel-like pattern. ron probably chose this for her. i think it is the same dress she wore to my wedding.

but mostly she looks so happy. in very few of the pictures where she is holding me when i was a baby does she look this happy. i don't think that this is because she was unhappy. i think she was anxious and uncertain and lost. it moved me to the core watching her holding my child.

sitting on mum's lap (1)

2007-01-05T12:39:00.000Z

this picture is of me sitting on my mum's lap when i was about 18 months old. i am in one of those very pretty dresses that people used to put little girls in. she is reading to me - i can't see what the book is. i seem to be distracted by someone else - not the photographer. my mum looks beautiful - i remember the necklace she is wearing. it was made of glass beads which i think were probably venetian glass. the dress is a typical pattern that she wore, rich jewel-like colours. we are sitting in my dad's chair. it was a green parker-knoll chair which had a winged back.

mum looks as though she is nothing to do with me in this picture. this may have been just a fluke of the camera. but somehow the woman and the child feel miles apart.

life is hard

2007-01-04T09:05:00.000Z

this is my dad on his motorbike. it was taken long before i was born, in north wales, where my mum and dad grew up. in this picture my dad looks happy, but i think even then he suffered from depression. he attributed the depression to when he was a young child and he was sent away when his older brother had tuberculosis. he said the feeling of rejection and worthlessness never left him, even after he was back with his family.

my dad's dad was a policeman. they had a rocky relationship. my grandad hit my dad a lot. i don't think he was violent with his other children. my dad remembered being made to sit in front of a cup of tea all day because he refused to drink it.

my dad's depression became severe as he got older. he tried to take his life on numerous occasions. as a young child i was not aware of this but as i grew older it became clear that what had at the time appeared to be accidents were in fact not. my mum told me of a time, when i was at school, when my dad had taken an overdose and was staggering around the flat. she had screamed at him that she didn't want me to come home and find him like that.

then there was the time when i was staying with my stepmum-to-be and my dad and he smashed up his car. at the time we were told this was an accident but in the light of later events and the type of injuries he had it probably was not. the explaination of it sounded unlikely even to a child. my dad said he shunted into the back of a car in a traffic jam, yet he managed to open an artery in the top of his head and needed 14 stitches.

then there was the time when he cut open his arm which cutting the hedge with a sickle. this might have been slightly believable if there hadn't been 3 cuts in his arm, suggesting several attempts. this was after i had moved in with my dad and stepmum.

then there was the time he took over 50 morphine sulphate tablets and went to a lonely place by the river to die. we got home from school and i instantly knew something was wrong. my dad's car was in the drive and his watch was by the bed together with his wallet and his loose change. there was blood on the edge of the bed (maybe he had tried to cut his wrists?) and there was a note in an envelope addressed to my stepmum on the mantlepiece. i rang my stepmum and she said she would come home. shortly afterwards a man rang saying he had found my father by the river when he was walking his dog. i knew the place as i looked after a horse for some people down there.

i went in the ambulance with my dad. my stepmum followed in her mini. i have a picture of the ambulance crew putting a red rubber tube down my dad's throat but i don't know if i have invented this after watching too many medical dramas - it seems unlikely that a stomach pump would have a tube like a bunsen burner but maybe they did in those days? what was particularly odd about this was that on that day at school we had been sitting our mock exam in english and i had written a story about a man who took an overdose. my friends would not believe me until we got the exam papers back.

then there was the time that my dad smashed his mgb soft-top car into a parked articulated lorry, at speed. this was when i was about 18 and my dad and my stepmum had split up. i was living with my dad in a house he had rented from a friend and my stepmum and younger sister were in a house she had rented from the hospital where she worked. dad had driven over there and smashed the car just up the road from my stepmum's house. he nearly died this time and was in intensive care for ages. he had split an artery in his neck, having just missed decapitating himself, and had to have plastic kneecaps fitted where the engine had crushed his legs. i refused to go and see him. i was so angry that he kept doing this to us. my then boyfriend sat with him and i just sat outside in the waiting room crying.

the police were going to prosecute my dad for reckless driving and then reduced the charge to driving without due care and attention. this seemed like a sick joke. to drive straight at the front end of a parked lorry on the opposite side of the road at 80 miles per hour and leave no skid marks whatsoever requires quite a lot of care and attention. the fire brigade sent my dad a bill for cutting him out of the car which seemed to me in my furious state to be quite apt.

since then i am not aware of any more attempts. eventually my dad and i patched up our relationship, although i have always kept a lot of me in reserve since. it is impossible to trust someone after this sort of thing. when i had my son i decided that it was important that he had a grandad so i put the bitterness behind me as much as i could.

my dad has just had his 80th birthday. he still moans about his knees aching, to which i always reply "serves you right!"

angharad

2006-12-26T19:11:00.000Z

among my mum's papers is a book of poems she wrote with her twin sister. this one makes me cry:

angharad

sometimes

i sit and

stare

across the

room to

where the

sunlight

slanting

on a chair

would

mingle

with your

hair

if you were

sitting

there.

a eulogy (part 1)

2006-12-26T18:46:00.000Z

this is what i would have said at my mum's funeral, if i could:

Val came into life in a traumatic way: the people attending to Mary, her mother, did not realise that Mary was carrying twins. So Astrid had been in the world about half an hour before Val was born.

Val and Astrid were identical - so much so that it was hard to tell them apart even as adults. Val told me of people coming up and touching them for luck when they were children. They must have been beautiful children with their pale skin and red hair; they certainly grew up to be beautiful women. Astrid is still beautiful now in her seventies.

It seems as though for a lot of her life Val was trying to escape being a twin. Her quest to be an individual consumed her and influenced most of the decisions she made. Astrid has told me how hurtful Val could be as they were growing up. But as Val grew old she became more comfortable with the idea that in the world was someone she had shared an egg with. Astrid gave me some of her letters which she wrote as she became ill with Alzheimers. They show a woman who was almost childlike, with an awareness of how she had failed the sister who had wanted to be close to her.

Certainly Val’s valuing of individuality was something that determined how she raised me for the 8 years I lived with her. She felt children should be allowed to develop with the minimum of boundaries so they could express themselves. This manifested itself in child-rearing that could have seemed neglectful; but I don’t think this was the case. There are snippets of memory that I have of her kindness and tenderness. I have smothered these because they nearly always make me cry. She would treat herself to a Boots Lemon Grass bath cube sometimes and she always gave me half of it for my bath. She baked cakes for my birthdays, and cooked lovely meals even after a long day at work. She made me clothes by hand, including circular skirts that needed bias binding sewing by hand all the way round which must have taken hours. In one photo of me in a lovely satin dress with pictures of chinese ladies on it I am wearing a vest. This says more that many of the other things - she worried about me getting cold.

A time came when she decided that she would let me go to live with my dad and his wife Maria. I will never know why or how this decision was arrived at. She asked me if I would like to live with Dad and Maria and her daughters and I said yes. For years this made me think I had chosen to go. But she chose to ask me the question in the first place; it is not a question I would ever ask my own child.

I have puzzled as to how she was able to let me go. None of the practical reasons make sense to me - that she was a working woman, it was hard to be a single parent in those days and so on. Now I have a child these are just so much rubbish. You could cut both my legs off and I would not let you take my child from me. I think the reason may be to do with being a twin.
My friend Merry says that your children’s skin feels like touching your own and this is true. They are made of the same stuff that you are, they have been nurtured inside you. This is why the bond with mothers is so strong. But maybe for Val this was her downfall. She already had been part of someone else. She and Astrid shared the same DNA. No doubt Astrid’s skin felt like Val’s own. So having a child must have set up a whole lot of conflicts within her that she had thought she was free of. The older I got the more she seemed to pull away from me. I in turn was hostile to her, in a way that she is unlikely to have experienced from Astrid who is a much milder character. The way she had brought me up had made me very difficult to handle. It must have seemed to her that I was acting out what she had been like to Astrid, pushing her away and at the same time needing her.

We will never know is any of this is true. The only person who might have known is dead. Even if she was alive she might not have had the self-knowledge to see into herself and explain.

What I can say is that the way Val gave me up has made me the person I am. Growing up knowing that your mother, for whatever reasons, has deemed you should grow up away from her leaves an indelible scar on a person. For many years I saw this as a weakness. But scars are tough, broken bones heal harder than they were before, and the early part of my life fitted me well for what was to come, with Dad’s suicide attempts and other difficult times.

It has also made me just the right mother for Owen. Bernie says, very wisely, that I could not have designed a better child for someone like me that Owen. He never wants to go off on adventures, which suits me fine as I have really extreme separation anxiety.

But the reverse is also true - you could not design a better mother for someone like Owen than me. He will need unconditional love and acceptance to help him build on his strengths and deal with his challenges. He will never be rejected by me. I know how bad that feels. I also remember a lot of feelings from being a child that might have faded into the mists if they weren’t so strong. So I can relate to a lot of what he feels. I hope he will be able to grow up into a strong a confident man who can do the things he wants to with his life.

So out of quite a lot of sadness and pain comes good in the end.

Go peacefully Val.

in reality i had to say much blander things. i was officiating. she was an atheist so there could not be a vicar and i did not know there was the humanist society then. so i had to say stuff that was true but also that would not be to raw for the rest of the people there.

two comments

2006-12-23T16:16:00.000Z

here are two comments i posted on another person's blog. when reading them together it gives a different picture to reading them separately. especially the food thing...

i am odd about my mum's death. she died in 2000 from alzheimers. when i was 8 i left her to live with my dad and my stepmum. i felt physical pain and would not eat any food my stepmum made. she left out catering packs of instant mashed potato that i went down and made after everyone else was in bed. i would not wear any clothes except those my mum had bought me. eventually it got impossible as i grew out of them and they were taken away and replaced with new ones. when my mum died i expected to be hit with a hammer of grief but i wasn't. i think it had already happened both to the 8 year old me and more mildly to the adult who watched the vibrant, beautiful mother she had once been degenerate into dementia.

and the second one:

my stepmum is polish and grew up during the war. she came from what is now lithuania. she saw things as a child that we could not begin to imagine. they were placed in camps and then came here as refugees. the legacy of being starved has made her hoard food, like a lot of poles. when they came to the uk her mother developed throat cancer and died a very painful death. my stepmum nursed her and looked after the family's lodgers, as well as studying to be a doctor. then she had my two sisters. she took me on when i was 8 and very wild and challenging. she worked as a child psychiatrist specialising in children who were victims of abuse. she is still a remarkably positive person in spite of all this. i would never have become a lawyer if it hadn't been for her influence and encouragement. it makes me furious when the right-wing press rant on about asylum seekers being spongers. my stepmum has changed many lives for the better through her work and her life. the country was lucky she came here.

my stepmum made me lunch last week. we talked about life and the past. she told me of how, when she and my dad were splitting up, when i was 16, and he was refusing to deal with selling the house, she had decided she was not paying any more of his bills. she said "i was just going to take the three of you up to newcastle [where her dad lived] and stop paying the mortgage." it is hard to explain the effect of this. i was utterly hellish at this time. i was totally out of control in a whole load of ways and very hostile towards her. yet she would still have taken me rather than left me. that means a lot.

protection

2006-11-14T18:41:00.000Z

my mum lived in the ywca when i was in my early teens (i lived with my dad) and i went to stay with her for access visits. one night someone broke into the room i was in and ransacked it while i was asleep. my mum thought the noise was me playing around so left it for about half an hour. then he went into the next door room where she was. she lept out of bed with a roar, ran naked at him and chased him out of the window down the fire escape. i didn't wake up until this happened but i have never forgotten the ferocity with which she went at a huge tall man.

this was the same mother who on other access visits took me to stay at a hostel for ex-prisoners in edinburgh (where i particularly remember getting horrific food-poisoning from corn beef hash). some of the guys had been in barlinie prison but she trusted them with me. i still have a copy of the little prince that one of them gave me.

mum

2006-11-14T13:40:00.000Z

this is my favourite picture of my mum. it shows her beauty and intelligence but also her sadness. when i have posted this on the net people who never met her commented that she had sadness in her eyes.

this picture was taken by her second husband. he was a journalist and had a pretty good camera. he was also a really, really unpleasant man.

mum met him when she was living in bristol. she worked with a woman whose husband was in broadmoor prison which is a secure hospital. for some reason (which i fail to understand to this day) mum started visiting him. he was in prison for serious violent offences. mum said he had been put in prison because he had blown up water mains when he was in the free wales army but i heard from other people he had taken a bottle to his wife's lover. the other day i heard this man's voice on radio 4 and it sent a chill through me even after all this time. he was being interviewed about the free wales army and sounded just as cold and unpleasant as did when i was a child. i had assumed he was dead.

mum not only visited this man but decided to have a relationship with him. she somehow got him out by putting pressure on the home secretary (mum said she got him out "on a section". i may have mis-remembered this - i was about 13 at the time). by now i was living with my dad and my step-mum and i remember receiving a postcard from mum saying she had met a lovely man and got married. this seemed a very odd thing to me and my dad and stepmum were utterly dumfounded at how she had told me.

mum and her second husband lived together in a flat at the top of a regency house in bristol. i went there for access visits. he gave me the creeps from the start. one time when mum was at work he took me to the pub and bought me pints of scrumpy (i was about 14) and then we went back to the flat. he started talking about how mum had other men. this didn't ring true for me. she seemed pretty wrapped up in him. he wound himself up into quite a state and then picked up a knife. he was rubbing it along his thumb and scared me to death. he went out later and i got my stuff and went to get a train back home. i had to leave mum a note.

later it turned out he was being violent to mum. he smashed up her record collection which was her pride and joy. she had records from when she was young and loved her music.

at some point he bought a run-down house in merthyr tydfil and she went to live with him there. the violence continued and eventually mum left. she was re-housed in swansea by the council. typically of her she didn't get a grant for any furniture and when i went up to see her she was sleeping on the bare floor on her coat. i was by now at college and got a job so i could send her money. more constructively i wrote to the dhss and got her the proper benefits she should have been getting.

she continued to try to see the good side of this man and spoke about him as a poor damaged human being. she had a streak which always sought out people like this.

my chinese pattern dress

2006-10-22T10:46:00.000Z

this is a picture of me in my chinese pattern dress. my mum made me this. i remember choosing the fabric and being amazed at how silky it felt. the pattern was of chinese ladies in a chinese landscape. it always felt very special when i wore it.

my mum made me a lot of clothes. she and her sisters were all very good at sewing. their mother had been a widow and they had been brought up in north wales on national assistance. my mum's younger sister dot made hats. she probably still makes them, although i am not in touch with her these days. my mum's twin made identical outfits for them to wear when my cousin got married. my mum always looked like a film star. i have pictures of her in fabulous tailored suits that she made herself.

i used to be embarrased by how smart she was. my mum worked full time as a secretary and sometimes came to meet me from school in her work clothes. once she came in a flowing black cloak and a wide-brimmed black hat with a silk rose. she told me that i once asked her to put her hair in curlers and come to meet me in her slippers like the other mums. we lived on an estate where everyone had been moved out of east london as a result of slum clearance. the families were cockneys and were pretty tough people. the other mums were very different to my mum. she read new society and the guardian and had opinions about all sorts of intellectual things. she had left school at 14 but had educated herself by reading everything she could lay her hands on. when she died i was given some of her books. they included plato's republic and dante's inferno.

in this picture you can see my vest so i assume it was taken in cold weather. it would have been taken when i was about 6 or 7. i think this must be a school photo as the background is plain. i look quite happy.

a long time ago

2006-10-20T22:37:00.000Z

this is me. it was taken, i think, outside the flats where we lived. i always look really hard at old pictures of me to try and see if they give any clues to what was going on inside my head. in most of them i am just a little girl looking at the camera.

this one would have been when i was about 5. i would have already been at school.

i remember on my first day at school my dad was living somewhere else. my mum said he was living in a flat in camberley with a woman. later on he came back. my mum told me she did not want him to come back but he had threatened her that if she would not let him he would never see me again. i was devoted to him and she could not bear the thought of this. when he was living away from us i used to sit by the window on the old sofa waiting for him to come home. my dad had grey hair and i used to call him my ghost. my mum told me that i kept saying "where is my ghost?" which broke her heart.

for my first day at school my mum bought me a wooden pencil box with a sliding lid. i spent ages playing with the lid. it had a little dent like a handle so you could pull it open. i had an apple and got into trouble for eating it in the class. no-one told you that apples were for break time.