5. A hard road ahead

It's a strange place to be, seeing into your childhood without blinkers, without the vaseline smeared over the camera lense, just reality as it was. Unvarnished. Awash with harsh winter sunlight.

Exploring the child you were, you still are inside, is an uncomfortable experience. Digging around in the most basic parts of your psyche. Those areas that are delicate as they are deep; dark as they are old. They are like an ancient forest. Slightly unreal, but incredibly there. They are the parts that have been damaged by my mother's illness. And the damage runs so deep. The fundamental areas that in most people function smoothly are running just off the tracks.

But the only way forward is to look back. And I am looking back. Links are emerging like lines in the sand. I am beginning to understand why I am like I am today. I am beginning to see the parallels between my mother and myself.

It would be easy to say I am like her because the elements of her illness also beat in my veins. But I know that's not it. The reason is simple: if I was also ill, I wouldn't be here now, questioning it.

The truth is much more complicated, like a tangle of fine wires. A child is a sponge soaking up all around it. And if those surroundings have faulty logic, faulty functioning basics then the child will learn that as the norm. The child will watch and follow and soak up all about its parent.

Even growing up, it is hard to see the damage that is being done. A child is extremely adaptable. A child is so reliant on that parent it can see nothing else.

I see this now. I am not to blame for what I am now. I am not at fault. Yes, it rests in my hands to mould my own future and I am doing that. I am determined to change the path. I am relearning old truths, those tarnished things that have never seen the light of day. I am looking at them, tossing them in the bin, replacing them with the shiny reality of sanity and normalcy.

There is guilt lurking around the edges. There is uncertainty and fear of stepping into that unknown of possibilities. There is anger and sadness for my lost childhood. There is hesitation that even now, I am remembering things wrongly, that things weren't that bad, that it's all in my head, even though I know things were so much worse, that it was all terribly real.

I feel like I am betraying my mother's love. I am betraying myself who is part of her. I feel I am bad, I am rotten to the core. I know this is the faulty wiring at work. I know I deserve so much better, I know I deserve all the wonders of the world without her poison still breathing within.

It is hard, it is strange, but the road ahead is there, beckoning.

And still I look back to understand how to forge ahead.

Things come to me. People talking to me. People offering their pitiful advice when they know nothing at all about where I came from. People who just don't get the monster who lived within my mother. Yet their words get to me, through that faulty wiring the monster installed, they make me wonder if I didn't try hard enough, long enough, wasn't good enough to change the monster back into my mother.

I have been asked time and time again, what if you stood up to her?

I want to laugh. Only those who grew up in this environment understand when I say my sister and I were prisoners. To stand up to her was to take your own life into your hands. There was so escaping her wrath. No matter what you tried, no matter what you did. Her illness would not allow it. Would never allow it. She would get you, bring you down.

I want to scream and bring the walls down around me. I want to shake these people who look at me as if to say, well, you didn't try to control her.

That's not my job. That wasn't my sister's job.

We were children.

Children are powerless. They rely on the parent to feed them, clothe them, care for them, love them, teach them control and boundaries. Children aren't meant to control our parents. We aren't meant to placate, cajole, try to stand up to her. We were simply meant to be children, being nurtured in a stable, loving, safe environment. We had none of that. What we had was a small piece of hell and there was no escape. No way to skirt around the pain and anger and abuse.

I want to cry. We should never have been there. And still people tell us we failed in some way. We failed to stop the monster emerging. We failed in all possible ways.

But this is not how it was. No one could have stopped the monster. If the adults surrounding her failed, how could we, as small children, do the same?

No, as I gaze backwards, I am satisfied we did everything a child could do. We were beyond most children from normal families. We grew up to be successful in many ways.

Those people and their voices are now banished with the pointless guilt, the uncertainty and fear. Because I am strong. I had to be strong to survive my childhood.

And now I am striding out, further along the road. I am eager to see where it takes me next.