I've been waiting for clear headspace, not too tired space, no other commitments piled up while I was in the dark playground space, to come here and talk about the world as it looks now, about fears and anticipation of fear, about losses.

My daughter, my daughter has blasted into that space with all her rage and hatred and smashed my thoughts into fragments because I outstepped my boundary and tried to move something forward that I thought would suit her.

I ... I made her a dinner, and didn't pretend it didn't exist. Selfishly, because I am sick of cooking food last thing at night before I go to my bed, filling the house with the smell of oven grease, rushing upstairs so she can eat warm food. I'm sick of pretending. I hate pretending. It hurts, it leaves a distracting sense of frustrated wrongness. I sent her dinner up to her at the same time as I made ours tonight. I sent it with her brother, thinking that would bother her less, but that bothered her more. I am to 'leave him out of this'.

Out of what? The weird, sick dance of pretending?

I want normal, so much. I want the luxury of just being. Not constantly worrying, wondering, gauging. Of having to hate myself and my wrongness, all my mistakes, my mis-steps, my faults, my fault.

I am tired, and weary and it is hard to hold on to hope.

My greatest fear is leaving my kids alone. I don't really have anyone who could look after them - deal with my daughter's exceptional needs. No one my son knows closely and feels safe with.

If I were to die of this disease, which I could, because being fat puts me in a risk category they would be so lost. But I imagine my daughter is sitting in her room wishing that I would die of it, thinking that it would be better. Thinking that she hates me and she would be glad.

Part of me wants to quit. No more clandestine dinner efforts, early nights, running about, guessing and gauging and pretending. I want to say, what about us, what about what your insane efforts to protect yourself from your evil mother are doing to US? Just eat your dinner, without making us pretend we don't know you're eating the food you're pretending not to eat. You're nearly seventeen. It's all so stupid.

But instead, by trying to force it, and make things easier on myself, I've made it worse, and now she'll start starving herself again. I knew it might happen but I thought it wouldn't. I don't know why.

I hate my reaction to her reactions: anxiety, fear, worry, resentment, defensiveness, blame placing, self-blaming, misery. I'm so derailed by it. I was for so many years and it made it all worse.

Now I'm meant to be imagining I'm the balanced, regulated adult, or whatever the phrase the therapist has for this fictional version of me, and choosing my response, or at least stepping back and looking at it in order to find my way to greater emotional regulation, which in turn will make my daughter feel safer and more able to do the same.

Right now, what therapy is teaching me is that I will never be ready to have a personal relationship with anyone again, but I'm sure I won't feel like that forever. It just feels like it will feel like that forever.