Day 1.

Day 1.

I’m writing a book of a life exposed, telling all those in my past, present and perhaps even my future that I blamed you for me. You will be pictured raw and stark, along with me on these pages clear for all to see, though this is for me and I hope will not be seen by another living soul.

I've started, as you often do with my birth screaming into this world of pain, into a family who failed from the very first to understand my needs, my wants and desires.

I struggled to be heard, to be listened to intently, with loving purpose to clear cluttered debris clogging up my path. I only heard laughter at my attempts to explain, to describe a picture in my heart, naked with all my longing.

My mother blessed being that she is laughed when I did not want laughter, stayed at home when I wanted to go out, stayed out when I wanted to go home. She tried I know, but nothing seemed to jell. She just didn’t understand that she wasn’t really listening to me. She could have, should have tried some more, but she didn’t and so I blamed her for the woes of me.

My father – well he wasn’t really there. He didn’t stop to listen or care when I tried to tell him how I felt. It wasn’t fair. My brother got it all - just because he was the firstborn and tall and a boy of course.

One time we lived in a tiny flat rented from a wealthy man who had a daughter the same age as me, who had the life and went to ‘the’ school that I dreamed I should have been allowed into. Envy settled in my heart along with anger at my family situation. Oh my god – they just did not understand. To give me the life they should have, could have, that I deserved. I was clever – but they laughed. They couldn’t see the possibilities of me.

My early life dogged by misery was small without adventure or glossy shiny pretty stuff - in memory as I recall. Washing piled up day after day, TV on nonstop making brain dead more brain dead. Food overcooked or out of packets and tins. Crazy loud laughter at jokes that were just plain stupid. Not enough money for books, nice clothes or decent haircuts - but always enough for gin and beer.

All of this you could see reflected in me. Plain Jane me, brown hair, small blue eyes, thin, white, and timid and yet red passionate anger lurked beneath the façade of me. I was so much more than what I seemed.

I was often sick with tonsils; inflamed, red, angry and sore. Days in bed away from school. Mum at work, me by myself, alone and sorry, and yet if truth be told, at peace in my chosen solitude…with a library book or two as my many friends.

We moved around a lot for dads work so friends came and went or never really came at all.

I wasn’t nice. I was difficult and awkward, indeed socially quite inept. My party loving parents seemed to make friends wherever they went and partied and had friends over and drank and laughed and made jokes.

I remember one birthday they had forgotten. There was a party – it wasn’t for me. No presents or anything at all until they finally remembered and put a matchstick in a chocolate biscuit that had holes in it. They lit it and they and their friends sang me happy birthday. It was a joke! It was heart-breaking.

I couldn’t wait to leave.

My education wouldn’t take me far so I pretended while I trained myself in ways that were the opposite of my life till then. I read books. I studied people, copied mannerisms.

I held myself tight and cruel and tough to separate myself from my past, to build myself a lie that would surface as a new life. The life I knew I deserved.

I shunned my roots and sought out company that consisted of smart cars with fold down roofs and names that people respected. I developed a style that could mask the meagre funds and became a bohemian chick with ragged skirts and second hand shop boots before it was fashionable. I read more books. I studied more people. I learnt and practised until I reinvented myself and never looked back. Until now.

I’m a parent now – a mother. I find myself with reflections that expose my judgments. I think I am being brutally honest with myself as I start to journal my memories but maybe even these have layers of veneer that don’t tell the whole truth. Was I that bad? Were my family that crass? Would my parents have the same memories, my brother, or would they see other standout moments that cling and define those years for them? Maybe happy moments.

That’s hard to know, to even find out as I believe both my parents have died. Not that I know for sure. Nobody has contacted me. They couldn’t if they tried as I erased all traces of that me they knew and called daughter and sister long, long ago. A new name, new country, new life, new family.

I’m forty five now and alone again as my teenage child has chosen to live with her father and moved out a week ago.

I don’t know how to move forward, to get up each day. I am hoping this journal; this writing down of my story will help me learn how to bring the pain of my childhood into perspective and dissolve the guilt I now realise that I carry with me each and every day. As a parent I have learnt that you can only do or be the person you are in that moment and that nobody is to blame.

One step at a time – One day at a time.

Day 2.