Postcards

I am a little haunted, today, these days, by the horror of my parenting of my daughter. The things I think I said, did, the way I acted all the time. How my mother told me her mother had been lovely until she was four, when my grandmother got pregnant again and became mean, and seemed to hate her. This repeated in my life... hormones, not hate. But I'm sure it felt like that. As my mother in law said, sadly, asking when therapy was going to make me better, 'you were such a lovely mother.' It haunts me. I stopped being kind and affectionate and fun, and became snappy, slappy, and screamy and cruel. Dear God.

That and the hindsight that makes me wonder, what if it was all just in my head? If everything else was fine, it was just my mental illness, depression, anxiety, PTSD - that made me so miserable and terrified and unable to cope. I was the only problem. Why could I not just have ... stopped? Calmed? Been nice? Kept my anxiety and loneliness on the inside and not let it hurt anyone. It's better now... I'm more normal now... not enough, but I'm not exactly the crazy bitch I clearly was. I know I woke up every day and swore I wouldn't shout, or get in fights with Cassia, or scream or snap. And then I would. And Niall warned me, that it would be like me and my father, and she wouldn't speak to me any more - and here I am, having gone a year without seeing her, despite the fact that we live in the same small house.

My friend who is a sort of goddess-mother of four told me, when she was young and having those impossible, hate-filled meltdowns, before I knew it was Autism, 'just love her' - and I wanted to. But I couldn't. She triggered all my childhood terror and loss of control, and I gave it all right back. My poor baby.

I have a golden memory of both of us taking her to lunch at a favourite restaurant with a beautiful garden, and sitting outside under ancient trees in the dappled sun while she took her first independent walk around, a little blond darling in beige combats and t-shirt with a big rose on it. We were so proud and full of wonder at her. It's easy to think it was all ok then, but I know too that I was sleep deprived and brimming with barely contained bereavement, and already fairly convinced that Niall wasn't in love with me any more. But it still seems golden compared to what came after.

This wasn't the post I intended to write. But maybe the fear of it all will grip me less if I do. I'll stop feeling like I'm having to run away from a great big ball of horror that's trying to suffocate me. The therapist says I had no choice, I had no way to know how to cope in the situation, I never learned. That feeling guilty and reliving it is a new survival technique, as it avoids becoming better and moving forward. I don't even understand the layers of it. But I'm pretty sure that's what it translates as. The guilt and horror seem deserved - my father never seemed to take any responsibility at all for what he put us through, he could only see his own suffering. It's true that suffering about it now does her no good - and that becoming a calm, capable, unafraid person would be the best way to be helpful now... not this vicious circle of self-torture. That co-dependent people do. How do you put down the burden of your own sins and failings?

If you could take a pill that made you forget all the bad things in your life, would you do it? Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind?