hagiography

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Kierkegard.

We all got born.  Most of us grow up, become adults and have children ourselves.  There's no big mystery to this.  What we don't seem to be able to work out, however, is why we're so miserable, why we can't communicate with each other and why we repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

My parents were terrible.  It might have helped if they hadn't been orphaned at an early age.  Neither of them understood how to fulfill their roles.  They did try, after a fashion, but it just kept going wrong.  Father loved me, in a way that's generally deemed unacceptable.  Mother hated me.  She was a Catholic.  She hated everything and everyone, especially herself.

I decided to start at the beginning, not because I think writing is a form of therapy, that's just narcissistic rubbish, rather because I believe that Athol Fugard was correct … If you can articulate something you can understand it and if you can understand it you can change it.

At the age of six mother told me my eldest sister was pregnant.  The thought horrified me.  Pointy things, long dark tunnels, growing ripe and bursting like a tomato.  Reality bites when you're a child.  I went and hid.  There's no escape though.

By the time I was eight, father was working abroad.  We visited him occasionally but mostly I wrote and he wrote back.  Then I got shunted sideways to my sister's.  It's odd being a permanent guest, never really having a home.

Things went from bad to worse.  I was diagnosed as schizophrenic, interfered with by the medical establishment, alienated by educational institutions and generally regarded as a problem requiring fixing, solving, erasing.  The more they fiddled the more broken I became.

And then I turned into an adult, capable of making my own choices and mistakes.  I did the usual things, went to college, took drugs, had unsavoury boyfriends.  It's all part of the rich tapestry of life.  I wasn't looking for Matt.  I sort of fell over him.  Of course I knew he was facing a lengthy prison sentence, but that just made it all the more exciting.  We got married.  I got pregnant.

When she was born I stared at her in disbelief.  Suddenly I was a mother and I had a daughter.  It hasn't been easy these last sixteen years, trying a raise a child with very little guidance or learned skills.  I panic sometimes that I've let her down.  Maybe my mother felt the same way.  I don't know.  There's just certain things you're never going to know.  I wish it had been different between us, when I was growing up, when I became a mother.  Perhaps if we'd been able to communicate we might have sorted the whole thing out.  I doubt it.

My daughter, in fact millions of daughters, leave home and start out on their own journey fairly ill equipped.  We have our trite sayings and our sentimentality, but what if we could arm them with the weapons they need to get through this life?  If we could share in order to succeed.  Honesty is perhaps the best policy.  We don't do it enough.

Just before she died I had a conversation with my mother.  I asked her why everything had got so messed up between us.  She said “When you get to my age you'll look back on your life and then you'll understand”.  She was seventy five.  I don't want to be seventy five before I understand.  Hindsight is not a wonderful thing.