Dear Mum

Tags

changing relationships, loss

I don’t know if this will help me let go, move on, accept, integrate, whatever it is I need to do but here are the words I will never be able to say…

Dear Mum,

We barely speak now, and never about anything substantial. You take me to one side to talk about Dad’s health and how you struggle to feed him up as he doesn’t like mentioning such things. In many ways, nothing has changed and you’re still dancing to his tune. Except that he did move back to England, just for you and that was a huge sacrifice for him.

My view of you has changed so much over the years.

I came home to you wallpapering the sitting room and hanging up the curtains you had made that now grace my sitting room. You took me to theatres and museums and introduced me to amateur dramatics with your first role as Mrs Noah. Dinner was always on the table; you took me to the library regularly and I could not understand why you were so excited to have a job at a local baker’s once I started school full time.

It was not until years later that you told me that your most serious thought of leaving my father was when he gloated over cheating and beating me at Scrabble. I have never been fond of the game. I would have been about six. You reasonably questioned what sort of person gloated about this but you also made it clear that you would have run away leaving us behind with him so it would have been yourself you were protecting, not us children.

When we moved abroad life changed. So much. Dad became the “big bad wolf” we had to protect each other from. In the evenings he was absent we’d sit and watch hours of television, whether there was anything to watch or not, just because we could. We did things to keep him happy and behaved differently when he wasn’t there. The house relaxed. It seemed like a great sisterly bond between us which felt great but none of this was good.

You could deal with 2sis’s epileptic fits, in those days before her medication worked. You were calm and caring and may well have prevented her swallowing her tongue. But you couldn’t cope with 1sis’s tantrums when she would scream and shout, sometimes throw crockery about. She would eventually calm down and typically be reduced to tears. That you left dad to deal with and, if he wasn’t there, you dealt with badly. You were frightened.

We started up the amateur dramatics. It was a fun release from the every day hum drum. You found it amusing watching me getting chatted up by men three times my age. The first person who said he loved me (and who knows what he meant) was white haired, and lovely. You trusted me to make sense and behave in an adult’s world and I did. I grew up far too fast and never got on with my peers again as they all seemed so childish.

Then there were the trips down to your mother’s, mostly without Dad. The three of us relaxed, drank, discussed everything freely and felt safe in a magical world. When your mother died for me that world crumbled. For you it still is a necessary retreat. When you wrote memoirs about your mother you titled it after the house, not her.

On our return to London, whatever we had left as a family all fell apart. Dad got ill with worry over new job; we didn’t have a house; you had no life and friends; I started a new school most unhappily. He had an affair; you went on anti-depressants for six months and then pronounced yourself cured. You fought to get off them, you said. I often wondered whether anything would have changed if you persisted with therapy or whether you stopped when you realised what you might open up.

At some point we had the conversation about 1sis being yours and not dad’s and why you hadn’t told me although you’d told 2sis, who took it badly. I don’t think I ever comprehended what an unplanned pregnancy did to you and when I eventually met 1sis’s genetic father I agreed that he wasn’t for you. But then, would you have married dad if you hadn’t been pregnant? I think not.

Dad had his affair and when she told you, you didn’t leave him. You decided it wasn’t worth the effort of starting a new life. You eventually forgave me for not saying anything about it long before I did.

I don’t know what discussions you two had about my first “proper” boyfriend but I think you persuaded dad that a boyfriend twenty years older than me was much more sensible than a young thing. No it wasn’t and when I tried dumping him it took a year as he threatened suicide. He did survive in the end but that was the start of a pattern of boyfriends who were emotionally abusive and manipulative, whether they knew it or not.

I had myself swallowed a bottle of pills one weekend. I left a note. I didn’t really believe the bottle was full enough to kill me, but I did think I might have to end up in hospital and have someone pay me some attention. In the end I just had a long afternoon nap. I woke up, put away the note and wondered what to day. I think the said boyfriend told my mother. But at any rate, you found out and when I threw it in your face a while later, you simply said that you knew. That was it. Never discussed since.

Fast forward a few years…

When I told you that I was starting counselling, your immediate response was “Are you going to start blaming us for everything?” My nice answer was that it wasn’t about blame, but about understanding which appeased you awhile. It wasn’t my honest answer.

Your mother got cancer. It became clear that she was not coming out of hospital to live in her home on her own any more. Can you imagine what that must have been like for her? You told me how, that last evening, you walked round the garden, breathing it all in and saying goodbye to the house. After much negotiation, she came back to England for wonderful NHS end of life care and luckily she didn’t quite last a year out but degenerated rapidly. I only went to see her once, what with small children and idiot partner. I should have gone down more but it was so hard. We knew we were saying goodbye and that failing person lying in bed waiting to die was not my grandmother.

I loved her so much and was grateful for all that she taught me. It was for that reason that I spent a whole year trying to explain to you both that when you gave 2sis all the contents of her house after 2sis decided to buy it for a family home that I felt ignored. It wasn’t fair.You were so relieved that you could take it off the market and keep it within the family that all those plans to let us all pick our books, keepsakes and odd piece of furniture in our grandmother’s memory vanished. After a year I got the briefest acknowledgement that you both may not have approached it the right way but it’s done now. End of story. That was the last time I tried explaining anything personal to you.

You used to acknowledge that 2sis spent many years trying to put me down. She never felt that she was the favourite and her answer was to mock me in front of you both as dad had. I let her because I realised it was her self-confidence that was lacking and not about me. At some point you decided to stop seeing any of this and not know what I was talking about. That hurt.

You were never good at emotional drama. A kiss and a hug and a few comments but very rarely were you willing to fight for me, or anyone else.

2sis took the house on and for a few years you and dad arranged summer holidays down there. I’d become single by then and we all shared a house across the road from 2sis and her family in my grandmother’s house. It worked for a few years but then living with my children just got too much for you. Dad made 1son cry once and that was the last time we stayed. It was the same holiday (I think) when I finally told Dad off for telling me to lose weight. I told him it didn’t help and wasn’t doing anything for my self-esteem. He reminded me that you had a brief period feeling depressed but that you’d fought it and won. I didn’t bother saying that maybe you should have stayed in therapy.

That last holiday was also the time when I said to you, and for once 2sis was in the room and supported me, that it was about time you either faced dad or stopped moaning about him. One way or another, deal with it, was my message. I was tired of hearing it. You didn’t like this and it was the first step in my breaking away from you.

The next year we tried having a holiday at your house but my children didn’t all go to bed at 6pm and Dad couldn’t cope. We had that fantastic moment when you sat on one end of the sofa, I sat on the other, Dad sat opposite us and said “your mother doesn’t think you two are talking as much as you used to “. You couldn’t even say it yourself but had to get him to. I said something about how counselling meant you revalued relationships and things changed. That was the second step.

The third and final step, when I heard whatever bond we had left break, was in the Italian restaurant near me. There had been an outbreak of teenage suicides in some village and it was on the news. You tittered and exclaimed how coincidental it was that two of your daughters had tried suicide. I didn’t know about 1sis so I asked and you told me. I sat there thinking “You didn’t go to her bedside. What sort of mother are you?”. The answer came to me, “a shit one” and that was it. I felt free of any sense of duty to honour you or be grateful. I’m not quite sure that’s the right phrase but it will do.

We’ve barely had a conversation since. You stopped coming over to see me or your grandchildren and dad did visits instead, which he could as his mother had died so he had more free time. And yes, I am thankful for the few pieces of her furniture of hers I have as they remind me of her every time I look at them. I’d asked for the one painting your mother had that I really like and you got me a replacement as one of your grandsons had expressed a liking for it so he came first. I hated the frame. I hated the lack of understanding. I still do.

There’s a reason we just have polite empty conversations, why I don’t tell you anything about my life, why I no longer phone up for a chat as you similarly don’t. There’s nothing to talk about.

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My Parents Are Old

Tags

changing relationships, swapping places

My parents are both over 80. They are old. They are physically fragile. They have just moved house and country, which is one of the most stressful things they can do. They are having to learn completely new ways of living. Small details such as in which bin do you put your rubbish take time to learn and all these changes are happening at once. Going round the supermarket my mother has to read all the labels as she doesn’t recognise the contents from the colourful packing or the visible branding that is not what she’s used to. They now have smartphones, having never used a touch screen device and barely having used a mobile phone. They have to learn their new house, which windows open, which keys do what, how does the alarm work, the oven. They have to learn to use more than one remote for the TV and the cable TV, how to use a new land line phone.

On top of all that, they have to discover their local area, find out where they want to go for pleasure, what they are going to do, what their new routines will be.

It’s a lot to learn. It’s even more to learn when you’ve spent the last fifteen odd years living in your own little bubble and having things exactly as you like them without having to change anything without months of thought and discussion.

Into this mix I come, now half an hour’s drive away instead of several hours. We’ve been used to quarterly day visits from my father and an annual visit from my mother. In the last month I’ve talked to each of them more than in the last year combined. It’s all changed.

The relationship is altered. What it is to become is yet to discover. At the moment I am the educator, the facilitator, the practical person. I am helping, explaining, supporting, teaching. The roles have changed; I won’t say reversed. I feel sorry for them. I see their fragility, both physical and mental. I want to help them and look after them.

But at the same time I feel annoyed that I’m being compassionate and giving up my time and it’s all about them because they don’t have the space to consider anything else. I mentioned my small housing benefit disaster and got nothing. I mentioned what my sons were up to and got nothing. It’s all about them. Nothing has changed on their side other than the passage of time. I can feel annoyance turning into anger deep down and that conflicts with the fact that these are old fragile people who are never going to change.They are never going to be there for me.

That is easier to accept from a distance.

My mother’s already reverted to talking to me about my father. His little quirks and his health because he won’t talk about them or acknowledge them. She’s not allowed to go up a ladder more than two steps in case she falls because he won’t be able to catch her. His cancerous nodules are growing which could mean anything but it reminds me time may be short.

And yet, what am I to do? No doubt conversations and help will tailor off shortly as they become more settled. Grandchildren will be less enthused about visiting once school comes back and it eats into their time. Their behaviour has been immaculate and helpful on visits so far. I’m not going to be taking my mother round the supermarket once a week or even once a month. I’m becoming the helper and the grown up, but they are not children and they are not helpless.

What do I want out of what time we have left?

The Day I Went Off My Mother

Tags

1sis, mother, parenting, suicide

It was a couple of years ago. I’d already had a falling out with her when I said I didn’t want to hear her moan about my father any more. Either deal with him or accept him (I mentioned this briefly in Shush Don’t Tell). She didn’t like that but I just felt sorry for her weakness.

However I remember the moment I just lost any faith and trust in her altogether. It was when she still visited me occasionally and we had gone out to lunch in a local Italian restaurant. I faced towards the river. I can point out the table if you like.

We were talking about the teenage suicides in Bridgend, so it was probably 2009. If you remember a teenager committed suicide and several other followed suit, as if it was contagious.

My mother said something like “I don’t know why I’m surprised, after all two of my daughters tried suicide” clearly thinking there was no logic to it and certainly not thinking that it was anything more than coincidence.

I did once, when I was 15, swallow a bottle of pills. It wasn’t serious and I just had a very good night’s sleep. I was hurt when I later found out that my mother knew about it but had never mentioned it but I just simply put it to one side. I didn’t know of a second attempt though.

“What do you mean, two of us?” said I.

“Oh, didn’t you know”, titter. I can hear that titter now.

My big  sister was in London when we were abroad. She took an overdose. Her friend took her to hospital where it was serious enough to have her stomach pumped. He looked after her and took her home with him. My mother rang her up.

“What’s this nonsense I hear?” she said. So 1sis told me, because if my mother had told me while I was still shocked that she’d said something so unbearably insensitive I would have hit the roof.

But note, she said this over the phone. She didn’t go to my sister’s bedside to be there for her. “Why not”, I asked. “Because she didn’t need me.” Right, of course not. Your daughter tries and commits suicide and doesn’t need her parents, either of them.

I had worked out several years ago that my mother doesn’t do big emotions. Cuddles yes, commiserations yes. But deal with big things, no. She can’t.

I asked my sister about it and she told me her side of it.

I tried putting it all to one side but it comes back to haunt me. Firstly what an absolutely stupid thing to say. But secondly,

HER DAUGHTER ATTEMPTS SUICIDE AND SHE DIDN’T GO TO HER BEDSIDE

(I abhor shouting, but that deserves it, don’t you think?)

I mean, if all you can do is kiss someone better or send them a card then you do it don’t you? The more you love them the more intimately you show your support but you show you care. Even if you can’t do anything. Especially if you can’t do anything.

The idea that my mother was incapable of doing that made me start to wonder what sort of mother ignores a child’s pain so much?

I understand that a lot of my own feelings of inadequacies, both as an individual and as a parent, stem from so many mixed messages from my parents. I doubt every decision I make as a parent and wonder on the long term impact of all of them.

But the idea that I could ignore their pain, whether physical or emotional, is just unthinkable.

Much as I know that my mother has her own stuff which she’s never dealt with, I have to say something I find difficult.

The mother who ignores her child’s extreme pain, is a shit mother.

 

Half Way Through

Tags

exercise, food, good habits, HAES, me, pressure, priorities, smoking, thinking, time

We’re half way through the holidays and I’m only just beginning to take the time to think about me.

I’ve made a good effort at writing this blog more regularly; I’ve gone back to thinking about HAES. I touched the Wii yesterday for the first time in months. I’ve started thinking about what I’m cooking in advance and I’ve started trying to add more fibre back into my food and balancing my diet more.

But it all takes time and thought and energy. I’m not going to have time to get set into new good habits before we go back to school and other pressures will take priority. I need to find a way of addressing this or I will never give myself the time.

When I stopped smoking over 5 years ago, I spent a good year thinking about it beforehand. I read Alan Carr’s book which helped a little, and was further helped by someone who said they’d read it 6 times before stopping. This made me realise the amount of thinking I had to do. But I did. I renounced my desire for smoking mentally, before I put that last cigarette out and as a result I quit without patches and without all  that feeling of deprivation that had gone along previous efforts. I wanted to not be a smoker so I was.

I need to perform the same sort of mindswitch here. The biggest and slowest switch is to throw out much of my ingrained habits formed one way or another by my parents and childhood. That’s a work in progress but I’m finally beginning to really understand how pervasive my childhood is and how much it affects everything. There’s a lot to unlearn, but I’m getting better at recognising the thoughts and feelings I need to throw out. I do need to think about what, if anything, I say to my parents about all this but that’s almost a separate issue.

Writing the previous few posts have made me realise other mindswitches I need to make.

In Fat Is My Prison I realise for the very first time how much my parents’ attitude towards sport and exercise has worked against me. They only value walking as exercise, nothing else. I taught myself to swim and did quite a bit of that when young, mainly because we had a marvellous and cheap swimming pool. That fell off when we returned to England and it wasn’t such a pleasure any more. I also learned to ride a bike with the help of 2sis and used that to go off cycling round the streets although I never got into going on big days out on it. Riding a bike is also something that stopped when I returned to London. Having learned on safe streets with good cycle paths I cycled to Weybridge once and was absolutely terrified and never got on a bike again. I do occasionally think about starting again, with all the riverside paths we have but this is something I feel I ought to rather than I want to.

Writing We’re Eternally Hungry has forced me to re-evaluate my diet. I always used to think my diet wasn’t that bad because I didn’t eat a lot of cakes, creams and puddings. Again this goes back to my parents. Nice sponge cakes with a bit of jam or icing in were all right but for the most part puddings were not deemed ‘proper food’ although we did indulge in the occasional patisserie. Just about the last time my mother made me cry was when she ridiculed me for wanting an ice-cream after a meal. The children could have one but it’s a childish thing to eat so why on earth was I bothering. I know that sounds petty and ridiculous but it hurt. Why was I not allowed to enjoy the simple pleasure of having an ice-cream along with my sons and nephews just because she didn’t want one. So I grew up with savoury=good; sweet=bad mentality. Chocolate is an indulgence we permit ourselves. So I need to throw out all that as well as all the diet indoctrination that goes on in my head.

I don’t really know how I’m going to keep up this level of thinking when term starts again. To write this blog, I need a good hour’s peace which I find in the morning if we’re not going to school or elsewhere or in the evening once they’ve settled down. I feel too much pressure on the hours while they’re at school to use that time to write which is something I need to try and address but that goes back to prioritising me over work which I find difficult. So I need to think more about that.

I also need to make the time to play on the Wii, something I don’t need peace and quiet for and don’t have to do in a solid chunk. Again I hear the thoughts that you don’t start burning fat until you’ve done at least half an hour so anything less is wasted. I need to throw out that thought and think that actually 20 minutes can make my muscles ache and that strengthening my muscles and making me stronger and healthier is actually what it’s about rather than as a source of weight loss (which according to research is a fallacy anyway). So if I can break it into 20 minute chunks that makes it a lot easier to squeeze it in during the day in a way that doesn’t make me feel that it’s pushing other higher priorities out of the way.

When I stopped smoking, I wasn’t working. But I didn’t have all my children at school yet either. So pressure was still there, just in a different way. I managed to find the time then to do what I needed to do. I need to find the time again.

I also need to continue to think about the implications of my reluctance to take the time to think about me, to not see this as a luxury but as a necessity. I still need to learn to value myself more, to prioritise looking after myself as essential and to take the time I need to do what I need to do. For me.

Out of the Blue

Tags

2sis, anger, child, mother, sister

There I was, minding my own business, sweeping the kitchen floor, when all this anger suddenly came spewing out of me. Well, in my head it did.

I could hear my mother asking, as she did a few years ago, whether I blamed her. At the time I said No, it wasn’t about blame but about understanding which was sort of true then.

What I wanted to say to her this afternoon was “Yes, I am angry at you. I’m angry at you for making a mess of your own life. You made one mistake, albeit a big one and you never got over it. That bitterness and anger that led you to feel trapped in a marriage you wouldn’t have chosen if you weren’t pregnant spilled over into my childhood. You expressed it to me every day ever since I can remember.

“I knew, even before I had the remotest understanding of why, that you weren’t happy, but that you didn’t seem able to do anything about it. You felt that my father was cold, heartless, rational, and that I needed protecting from him if I wasn’t going to be hurt. I didn’t need to be any more confused about my father than I already was. He could be warm and affectionate but he also drove me to tears too many times for me to count. He scared me with his anger and his lack of understanding.

“I loved 1sis, as I still do, but her moods went up and down; sometimes she lived at home and sometimes she didn’t. When she was there for me, she was all the way there, but much of the time she wasn’t, either absent or bound up in her own problems.

“2sis makes me angry. Although we tried to be friends at some point, she went off to university and escaped. Sometime after that it all went bad between us. She resented 1sis being alive and she resented my father’s perceived favouritism towards me. She felt she didn’t have her rightful place within the family and she took it out on me. She belittled me, mocked me, said hurtful things. She did them in front of you and you never told her off. She did it in front of my father and he never even noticed. You used to acknowledge that she caused me pain, but when I started to find my voice, you backtracked and said you had no idea what I was talking about. Us both becoming mothers drove us further apart and we certainly never swapped parenting tips. The fact that I was pregnant as she was getting over a miscarriage didn’t help. We now have no contact with each other and I don’t know what to say when my children ask when they are going to see their cousins.

“As to my father, I feel more frustrated than angry towards him. He genuinely does not understand where his life has gone wrong. He said to me the other day that there was a youth club attached to his school but he’d never gone as he didn’t see the point of having fun and making friends. He still doesn’t. For that reason I find it difficult to feel angry towards him.

“But to you, who was aware that things were wrong in your life but refused to do anything about it, I feel anger. When you told me about the one time you thought about leaving him, when he was gloating about having cheated and beaten me at Scrabble aged 6 you talked about how we children would feel in the morning if you had gone. You did not contemplate taking us with you. And when 2sis had her stomach pumped, you weren’t there for her then either. When you were told that I’d swallowed a bottle of pills, you never mentioned it to me.

“Was your life really that hard? Has keeping quiet for all those years got you what you wanted?”

 

IE: Diets Don’t Work

Tags

Allen Carr, diet, emotion, food, HAES, IE, Intuitive Eating, mother, smoking

“Dieting is a form of short-term starvation“.

The forward to this book includes the following: “Through Intuitive Eating, they [clients] have learned to trust the wisdom that has always been within, but had been blunted by years of self-doubt”. That last phrase, “years of self-doubt” echoes strongly with me.

As a child I never had an eating problem. You ate what was provided, like it or not, and children’s menus didn’t exist. I remember my mother stating that we had potatoes at every meal until I was 7 because she couldn’t afford to feed us all otherwise. I don’t remember feeling unhappy about my weight until after I’d had my first child. Subsequent to that other confidence issues began to take over my life.

Even then I didn’t really recognise a problem. As a child I had enjoyed cooking and was perfectly competent. My ex-husband enjoyed cooking and gradually took charge in the kitchen having decided that I couldn’t cook. I didn’t really mind this slur as I was quite happy not to cook. I have since completely lost my joy in cooking and really struggle with the simple act of providing food for my family.

Although I hadn’t a problem with food as a child, my mother did, as I touched upon briefly before. I watched her from the age of 7 onwards fight a battle with food. Living abroad didn’t help with all the cheeses she loves and other wonderful food. She struggled with different diets when we got back to England and her weight swung up and down. I think she’s fairly stable now, but quite overweight. I tried to provide emotional support for her as no-one else was going to and I think I had years of her self-doubt reflect on and influence me so that I was burdened with her weight issues before I gained my own.

Furthermore I now begin to realise how much emotion is attached to food. My parents would spend hours discussing food: what to cook, where to buy from, how to alter the recipe,did it need another ten minutes, was it good, should they do it differently next time… It seemed endless. I was once asked how Christmas could be improved and my answer was simply ‘stop spending the whole day talking about the meal’. Celebrations are about having a big meal. Not about having the family round the table for a long chat in each other’s company accompanied by food, but by a meal which is the focus of the gathering and after which we all leave. This makes me angry now, thinking of all the time wasted and conversations (or fights) not had because of the focus on food. My parents somehow saw food as the glue that helped us stick together – ‘the family that eats together, stays together’ was often quoted by my father even though he didn’t really understand what was meant by that. He took it literally.

Going back to the book, diets don’t work. People fail to adhere to them, fall off the wagon and put the weight back on coupled with guilt. One of the symptoms of “diet backlash” is “having little trust in self with food”. I feel a lack of confidence with my ability to eat well anymore. I don’t think I eat badly but too much. Diets help break the direct feedback you have with your body over food by trying to impose the dietary rules on you (you can’t be hungry: you had a limp lettuce leaf an hour ago). Your metabolism becomes sluggish if you diet too much; I don’t know if I suffer from this as I don’t know what having a normal metabolism feels like, but it’s worth remembering.

One interesting fact is that according to studies the growth in commercials for dietary products has a parallel trend in eating disorders. Obviously there are lots of other similar pressures: women’s magazines (which I don’t read) but also newspapers and other media always identify and equate the body beautiful with a slender one even if they’re discussing whether it’s a valid comparison. My father kept telling me to lose weight until I finally said that I had confidence issues and please could he shut up. Listening to friends talk about their diets is also pressurising. Just the fact that clothes shops have larger quanties in the smaller sizes adds to the pressure.

I think of the parallels between this approach and that of quitting smoking. When I stopped smoking almost six years ago I read Allen Carr’s book on how to quit smoking and while I didn’t put out my last cigarette whilst reading it did show me the degree to which I had to change the way I thought about smoking before I could stop without masses of will-power. It took me over a year to turn it all around in my head, but then I stopped with very few cravings and have rarely thought pleasurably about smoking since. Dieting seems to be me to be that equivalent of quitting eating (well, mostly) without changing the way you think about food. The fact that you’re not stopping entirely but are trying to find a balanced way forward makes it much more challenging than quitting smoking. And I’ve done that.

Quotes are taken from “Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch

Detaching Myself From my Children

Tags

children, detach, emotions, independent, parent

Let me start off my saying that I love my children. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

I knew I wanted children by the age of 10 or 11. Or so I thought. Now I wonder whether I really wanted children, or whether it was the idea of having my own family where I could make the rules and get away from my parents that was so appealing, and that later on I saw marriage as an escape rather than a positive commitment in itself.

I also felt that my mother’s happiness depended on my support so maybe I did fall into that trap of thinking that children would make me happy. That’s a tough one.

But, I love them most sincerely and consider it my responsibility to do the best by them I can. I still can’t accept just ‘good enough’ as a parent and I do very much struggle with guilt over all the things I don’t do for them and the opportunities I cannot provide. The fact that I may do better than my other parents, single or not, as my headteacher regularly reminds me, doesn’t actually cheer me up.

For many years my life has been dominated by my children. As, I think, it should be when you make that commitment. I breast fed all four, up to 21 months which I think combined to a total of 6 years. I never used a dummy (believe the Americans call it a pacifier) or fed them out of a bottle. I didn’t leave them to cry and would often lie down with them to get them asleep and start dozing myself. I have to say that although that meant a lot of disturbed nights for the first two years of their lives I quickly got to the point where they were good at sleeping and they never wake up now and never try climbing into bed with me unlike some of their peers. So I feel the sacrifice of sleep in those early years was worth it. They even let me have a good lie in on a Sunday morning which I treasure.

For maybe ten years, with interruption,s happiness depended on getting enough sleep. I also got divorced and moved several times and did lots of other things. But my life was and still is centred around the children. I worry that they have no other adults who are close to them, let alone to provide them with a male role model. On the other hand they no longer hear arguments, shouting, and stressed silences and we are a stable family unit. I also worry about what happens if I die, and who I could ask to take them on. I usually reach the conclusion that I should just be careful not to fall under a bus.

In many ways I define myself by my children. I follow academic years rather than starting a new year in January. I’m having a good holiday if they are. I’m enjoying peace and quiet if they are happy being involved in something. If they get enthused about something, so do I.

Last year my mood has been incredibly volatile since 2son stopped going to school. If I had put effort into him and got nowhere I would be frustrated and miserable. If he had got up or said something positive I would feel good. If I’d heard good news from one of the support services I would feel buoyant, if bad news I would slump. My mood did not depend on what I was doing or feeling, but what he was.

I need to detach my emotions from being so intertwined with that of my children, especially 2son. Hiding behind him last year has stopped me doing things and making progress in my own life; but it’s also stopped me feeling the emotions that I want to and need to as my emotions get subsumed by his.

I have to make progress with my life. I have to learn to do things that make me feel good and positive irrespective of what mood my children are in. I have to relearn being an independent individual who can be happy if she wants to. Otherwise I haven’t learnt anything from my mother’s example.