Wake Up, Mummy (12 page)

DEE DIDN’T WANT
to be lumbered with another man’s child and he told me he’d only stay with me if I had an abortion. I was already struggling to support my son and I couldn’t see any alternative, although it was a really difficult decision to make. I loved my son, and it felt as though I’d be killing another baby who would have been just like him. I cried a lot, both before and after I’d had the abortion, and then, two weeks later, I went to Dee’s house and found him in bed with another girl.

It felt like the worst betrayal of all. I was racked with guilt about what I’d done, and also, without really realising it, I’d been mourning the loss of my unborn child. All the feelings I’d been suppressing came out in a rush of furious anger as I hurled myself across the room and attacked them both. I kept hitting and punching them as hard as I could, and the girl just lay there, trying to
protect her face with her arms. I was shocked and hurt, but most of all I was hysterical with grief at the thought that I’d had an abortion mainly because Dee had promised to stay with me if I did.

Later that day, the police arrived at my house and I was arrested and charged with ABH and criminal damage. When I went to court for the trial, the girl didn’t turn up to give evidence against me, but I was found guilty of ABH, fined and given 12 months’ conditional discharge.

Fortunately, being arrested wasn’t seen as anything unusual or shocking by the people I mixed with. And nor was being the mother of a young child and still going out and getting drunk every weekend. I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, but I was searching for someone to love me, although unfortunately, mostly because of what Carl had done to me, I had a very confused idea about what love was, and I don’t think I’d have recognised it even if I’d found it. In any case, I had such low self-esteem that I didn’t believe someone like me deserved to be treated any better than I was treated by the low-lifes I came into contact with. So I continued to allow myself to be used and abused by anyone who showed even the slightest interest in me.

Then, one day, when I was changing my son’s nappy, I looked down at him as he lay smiling and gurgling and waving his arms in the jerky, excited way he always did,
and I thought,
What the hell am I doing?
It was like a physical shock, as if someone had punched me in the stomach, and I had to grasp the edge of the table to steady myself as the answer to the question came to me:
I’m giving my son the same miserable, dysfunctional life my mother gave me. A life I hated
.

I thought about all the times my mother had failed to be there for me; all the times she’d been too drunk to listen when I had something important I wanted to tell her; and all the times she’d let me down because she’d rather drink with strangers and people who didn’t care about her than spend time with her own children. That was exactly what I was doing to
my
child, and that was exactly the sort of mother I was going to become. I could envisage the miserable, dead-end life my son was going to live because he had a mother who would be lying in a drunken stupor whenever he needed her most. And I knew how he was going to feel as he got older, because I’d felt that way myself for as long as I could remember.

That was the day I stopped drinking – and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol since.

When I was 21, I started seeing Ken again – the father of my aborted child – and it wasn’t long before he’d moved in to live with me at my mother’s house. Although he spent every weekend at the pub, and was often arrested for fighting when he was drunk, he was good to my son,
who idolised him. A year later, I gave birth to Ken’s daughter, and it finally seemed as though I’d become part of the one thing I’d always longed for: a family.

Our daughter was 18 months old when I decided I’d had enough of living off the social, and I started to work full-time in a factory. When I was growing up, by the time my mother had put aside the money to buy her week’s supply of alcohol, there was often not enough left to buy food, and I was determined my children weren’t going to live like that. They were going to live in a nice, clean house with decent furniture, and they were going to eat good food every single day of the week.

My mother agreed to look after the children while I was working. I know that sounds as though I must have lost my mind, but although she was a terrible mother, she turned out to be a really wonderful grandmother. One day, when my son was just three years old, he’d found her in bed unconscious and covered in vomit after she’d tried to commit suicide. She’d had to be rushed to hospital to have her stomach pumped, and afterwards she’d been devastated by the fact that it had been her grandson who’d found her in such a terrible state. And because she loved my children and she knew I wouldn’t let her look after them unless she was totally sober, she’d started to restrict her drinking to the weekends. For the first time in her life, it seemed that something mattered enough for
her to make the effort to get her act together for at least a few hours every day.

Ken opened a bar with a friend, which quickly became popular and began to bring in a lot of money. So, after just four years of monotonous work in a factory, I was able to leave and go to night school to learn the skills I needed to get a better-paid job in an office. I worked hard, and although I didn’t really need to work for financial reasons, it gave me a sense of purpose and made me feel as though I was living the normal life I’d always wanted to live, and it wasn’t long before I was promoted.

I think that, like many people who’ve experienced an abusive childhood, I had to work harder than anyone else at everything I did, because I had to try to prove to everyone that I wasn’t useless and worthless, as I’d always been told I was. Mostly, though, I was trying to prove it to myself, and that’s something few of us ever really manage to do. Something else many abuse survivors share is the drive to create order in our lives, because we always feel that if we relax for even a moment, the chaos we lived with as children will come rushing in like a tidal wave and overwhelm us again.

I felt, too, that people were looking down on me. I’d be talking to someone in the office, and they’d be listening to whatever it was I was saying, when I’d suddenly become convinced that although they seemed to be taking me
seriously, they were actually laughing at me, because they knew who I really was and where I’d come from. I’d break out in a cold sweat and lose track of what I was saying, and sometimes I’d have to stop in the middle of a sentence so that I could escape. In reality, though, I don’t suppose anyone had any suspicion that I wasn’t the respectable mother, partner and work colleague I appeared to be.

Constantly looking over my shoulder and being afraid of the shadow cast by my childhood also meant that, as well as working really hard at my job, I made sure that my children were always immaculate – clean and shining from head to toe; that my garden was the neatest and best tended of any in the neighbourhood and that my house was, quite literally, clean enough for you to eat your meals off the floor.

When my son was five years old, he made a new friend, a little boy called Mickey, who everyone else hated. Mickey was one of half a dozen children born to the same mother, but all with different fathers. His current stepdad treated him badly, and his mother simply didn’t care about him. The first time I met him, he turned up on our doorstep on a very cold day in the winter wearing a jumper that was full of holes and with his feet poking out of the ends of his shoes. I asked him where he lived, and whether his mother would be worried about him, and he
looked surprised as he assured me she wouldn’t. It turned out that he’d walked a long way trying to find our house, because he wanted to see my son, who was the only friend he had. He stayed with us for a while and then I took him home in the car, and by chance shortly afterwards, his family was rehoused temporarily just across the road from us.

No normal person likes to see children being mistreated, either mentally or physically, and as the house where Mickey lived gradually became more run-down and filthy while his mother watched TV all day and the children roamed the streets and got into mischief, I knew exactly how that little boy must be feeling. He began to spend more and more time at our house. He’d eat with us almost every night, and we’d take him with us whenever we went swimming or out for a meal – he’d never eaten in a restaurant before. On one occasion, he stayed with us for two weeks without ever going home, and his mother never once came looking for him. One day, I discovered that he’d been banned from the school bus for fighting and that for the last few days his mother had simply left him to walk the three miles to school and back. So I started driving him there in the mornings and then picking him up in the afternoons.

It felt as though I had to do for Mickey all the things I wished someone had done for me when I was a child.
And then eventually the family moved away and the two boys lost contact with each other. Later, I heard Mickey had got into trouble with the police and gone to prison, and I was sad that I hadn’t been able to do something to help him. It was the road I’d always thought I was going to travel myself, but maybe I’d avoided it because of the seeds my grandparents had sown – in my mind and in my heart – when I’d lived with them for two years as a little girl.

Whatever the reason I was saved from the future that seemed to have been mapped out for me, I know that when children start getting into trouble, you need to look at their family relationships. If there’s no one in their lives who loves them and cares enough about them to teach them right from wrong, and there’s no one to teach them to have self-respect, then how can you expect them to respect anyone else?

When my children were young, I rarely saw my father. He spent quite a lot of time with my brother Chris and his wife, but he wasn’t interested in me or my children, although I never gave up hope that one day things might be different.

He’d always been a heavy smoker and drinker, and he had a family history of heart disease, and one morning when he was in his mid-forties, he got up to go to work as usual, had a heart attack and died.

His death hit me harder than I could ever have imagined. Not because I’d lost someone I loved, but because I’d lost the chance of ever having a good relationship with my dad. For years, I’d clung to the hope that one day he’d be proud of me. And now that hope was gone and I felt cheated. It had been ten years since I’d tracked him down, just before my grandmother died, and since then I’d only seen him a handful of times. It hurt me that my brother had never confronted him and asked him why he treated me the way he did. But, after my father died, Chris told me that he had wanted to get to know me. I’d like to think that was true, even though it was too late anyway.

When I was 16 and I found my father, I assumed he’d love me automatically, simply because he was my dad, and that I’d love him too. In reality, though, we were strangers, with nothing but bad memories of the past we’d briefly shared. It was a realisation I found hard to deal with at the time. I’d been so certain that when we met again, everything would be great between us; that we’d be like any normal father and daughter. But that hadn’t happened. We didn’t love each other; in fact, we didn’t even like each other. After that meeting, I’d sent him a Father’s Day card, but he hadn’t acknowledged it, and I think it was then that I realised I couldn’t stand the sight of him or even bear the sound of his voice. When my two eldest children were born, he’d wanted nothing to do with
them either, claiming that he was unhappy about becoming a grandfather so young.

After he died, one of my aunts dug out an old family photo album and I saw a photo of my father on the day he married my mother. It was the first time I’d seen a picture of him as a young man, and I was struck by how similar he looked to the first boy I ever willingly slept with. They were almost the spitting image of each other – the same build, the same closely cropped hairstyle, and the same big eyes and long eyelashes. I’d always told myself I didn’t want or need my father’s love. But as I looked at that photograph, I wondered if I’d been searching all my life for someone to take his place and love me.

Going to my father’s funeral seemed to be the right thing to do, and I suppose it was also something I needed to do for my own sake. His mother had developed dementia by that time and I was sad that she couldn’t recognise or remember me, her eldest granddaughter. The rest of his family chose to ignore me. They must have wondered why I was crying about the death of a father who hadn’t cared about me and who I rarely saw. But I think what I was really upset about was that, having lived my entire life in the hope that better things were just around the corner, it was hard to come to terms with the fact that now I’d never hear my father say he loved me
and that he was sorry for the way he’d treated me. In reality, though, that was something that probably would never have happened, even if he’d lived to be a hundred.

I continued to work hard at my job, and I earned a decent salary, although Ken’s business was going from strength to strength and we didn’t really need the money. My third child was born when I was 30 and my fourth a year later, after which I didn’t go back to work. We bought our house from the council and my mother moved into a flat nearby, which is where she was living when she met Dave. Unlike almost all the other boyfriends she’d ever had, Dave was a nice man, with a job and a house in Spain, where he often took her for holidays, and after a while they got married.

Things were going better for us all than I could ever have imagined.

I never tried to talk to my mother about my childhood or about the damage her behaviour had done to me in so many ways. But, despite all the things that had to remain unsaid between us, we’d developed a surprisingly good, if careful, relationship, which was based largely on our shared love for my children. Things were going so well with Ken’s business that he’d opened another bar and we were eventually able to sell our little ex-council house and buy a large, airy, detached house not far away.