Liars, cheats and weirdos ...one divorcee’s truly shocking dating app diary
Their love is unconditional. And when Paul’s mother died recently it unleashed an avalanche of grief that will resonate with so many...
RECENTLY, I’ve been stung with regret by a memory from when I was four or five. I inherited my father’s monstrous temper and, at an age when a child is testing their boundaries, I would deploy my anger fairly often if my mother didn’t instantly accede to my demands.
On this occasion, at our home in South London, I remember running up to the top of the stairs in my rage at some insignificant slight. Mum appeared at the bottom of the stairs smiling and put her arms out, inviting a swift rapprochement. I screamed that I hated her. But instead of being hurt by my outburst, Mum softened her demeanour still further, extended her arms once again and said: ‘Come on, lovie, come down and give me a cuddle.’
Even now, more than 40 years later, I can still feel that overwhelming urge to race down the stairs into her arms. It was all I wanted to do, to be wrapped up in her embrace and forgiven for being an idiot.
But I just couldn’t. My stubborn DNA precluded any kind of detente. I shook my head and ran into my room.
Five minutes later, Mum came to see me in my room. I know we must have made up, but the details are lost in the fog of time.
What isn’t lost is the feeling of regret, of wishing I’d run down the stairs to be held by her when she asked me to. The chance for that cuddle was lost for ever when my infant pride exercised its power.
That deep blue wash of remorse will stay with me until I die. Sometimes it’s not the things you do that leave the most permanent scars, it’s the things you don’t do.
And since my mother died last Christmas that episode keeps replaying in my mind. It just won’t go. It’s not guilt so much as remorse. I want that cuddle back.
Mum’s death at the age of 84 saw my world collapse. It’s still collapsing. Every time I think I’m clear of the rubble, another avalanche of grief threatens to engulf me.
At my lowest ebb, I sometimes feel as though I’ve been cut adrift, as if I’m no longer tethered to the world, that even having a lovely girlfriend and twin daughters can’t compensate for the absence of the one person in the world who loved me unconditionally.
DON’T get me wrong. I’m not sitting at home crying and wailing. I work, play with my girls, watch football, have the occasional glass of wine. I laugh and I joke. To many people, my life would seem normal.
But there’s this huge, black void in my core. Mum’s death has hollowed me out — I’m here but I’m not here.
The most influential person in my life has ceased to exist. I’m just a husk now, a shell. Sometimes, I’m not sure I’ll ever be whole again.
The magnitude of my grief has shocked me. But then, I’m beginning to realise that a man is never too old or too young to be poleaxed by the loss of his mother, as Princes William and Harry demonstrated this week. She’s the first love of his life.
The difference between losing Mum and the death of my dad three years ago aged 89 couldn’t have been more stark.
Then, I felt nothing. He’d been a cruel, violent father.
I fretted for a while, worried that I was some kind of monster, that I should surely feel something at my father’s death, but friends told me it wasn’t my fault that I felt nothing for him.
It was his fault. He’d beaten all the love out of me.
But when I went to clear out Mum’s house last month, I was almost paralysed by heartbreak. For 48 hours I did nothing but sort through old photos. I posted a few of them on Facebook, with a tearful commentary. That was a really strange thing for me to do — to open myself up so completely to my social media friends. My usual Facebook fodder is football and politics.
My girlfriend of 17 years has often told me that I’m a closed, private person. I find it hard to talk about myself and it takes me a long time to trust people. So, why did Mum’s death prise me open like an oyster?
The reason is quite simple. Mum was not just my only line of defence against my violent dad, my protector if you will, she also performed both parental roles in my upbringing.
She was my mother and my father. The loss of such a pivotal figure in your life is surely bound to make things come undone.
After I reached ten and started to think for myself, my father was useless. He was a textbook narcissist, unable to muster even the vaguest scrap of empathy, focused only on what others could do for him and utterly oblivious to his low IQ.
He may have lived in our house, but only really as an occasionally violent lodger.
To make up for his incompetence, Mum took on his parental job. She bolstered my fledgling football career by encouraging me to seek extra coaching, provided my moral education, nurtured my love of books and offered advice on my dealings with the opposite sex.
Mum, of course, thought I was the most handsome boy on the planet, an opinion in stark contrast to my father, who claimed I was ‘no film star’.
My father’s sentiment may have been admirable in its undeniable accuracy, but perhaps wasn’t what a gangly, spotty 14-year-old needed to hear. Dad was a little jealous of my bond with Mum. Not only did we have an intellectual connection, I’d inherited her dry and surreal sense of humour and we spent a lot of time making each other laugh.
I’d poke fun at her and she’d respond instantly — we were a good team.
I had always been close to Mum. She was my first love. All my good memories of early childhood concern her.
HEr brilliant storytelling, her ability to mimic other people and her love of Jimmy Young’s BBC radio 1 show are part of the fabric of my childhood memories. We spent nearly every minute of every day together before I started school.
Then, she took a job as a care assistant at the hospital next door to my primary school and adjusted her shifts so she could collect me each day. But when I moved on to secondary school, Mum decided her life needed a different focus.
She was a bright woman, but she’d married at 19, had children straight away and been a housewife ever since. Before me she’d had my elder sisters — Phyllis, who was born in 1954, and Maria, who was born in 1956.
By 1974, at the age of 42 with her youngest at secondary school, she was ready to use her brain. She trained to become a nurse.
Early one Saturday morning in 1975, she heard the post hitting the doormat as she was lying in bed drinking a cup of tea. She called to me downstairs, where I was reading.
‘Paul, lovie, can you check the post? My exam results are due today and I can’t face opening the envelope. Can you do it and tell me what it says?’
I did as she asked. The news was positive and the image of her galloping down the stairs in her frilly nightie, shrieking with delight, perm bobbing, is one of my default memories of Mum. It
makes me smile, not just because she looked more than faintly ridiculous (Mum never really cared what other people thought of her), but because she had finally done something worthy of her intellect.
On one of my many footballrelated visits to our local hospital’s A&E department over the next few years, a doctor asked me if I was related to Nurse Connolly.
I said ‘Yes’ and what he said next plumped me up with pride. ‘She’s better, cleverer and more clued up than most of the doctors here — she would have been a great doctor herself.’
These were some of the happiest days of her life, though the shadow of her husband’s malevolence could sometimes obscured her joy; he was jealous and scornful of her career. Though I must have been aware that Mum didn’t much like my father, she didn’t talk about it until they retired to Ireland in the late Eighties.
Thereafter, whenever I visited, we’d spend an hour each morning over a cup of tea, or three, picking over the bones of the most recent of Dad’s episodes of unpleasantness, while he snored in their bedroom.
But for reasons mainly involving her fervent Roman Catholicism, I suspect, she didn’t leave him. That regret tainted the rest of her life, embittered her, changed her imperceptibly, but tangibly.
When she had her children around her, she could almost forget Dad’s malignant presence, but when we were gone, his toxicity seeped into her pores.
Each time I visited her, she’d become a little more caustic, as if Dad’s poisonous view of the world was rusting her goodness.
There was a respite in 2013 when my twin daughters were born. Mum had given up on me having children, so the arrival of twins, more than 20 years after the birth of her previous grandchild, revitalised her.
She travelled to England to see us and the years fell away, her love of children overcoming the recent bitterness.
SHE chatted endlessly to my daughters, devising off-the-cuff and hilarious tales of bunny rabbits and pussy cats embarking on chaotic picnics.
The girls craved her attention and demanded they be allowed to wake her up each morning.
The respite lasted only one year. Dad died in August 2014 and then my eldest sister followed, taken by cancer, three months later.
It had fallen to me, sitting in a cafe at Heathrow Airport waiting for a flight to Malta where my sister had been taken to hospital, to tell Mum her firstborn had died the previous night. She crumpled, her inner structure disintegrating.
My sister’s death finished Mum. She turned against everyone and everything but her two remaining children and the twins, dragged down into recrimination, bitterness and guilt. Her decline was precipitous. Her lungs began to fail and she lost much of her sight to an infection.
Since the deaths of my father and sister, I’d made a point of Skyping Mum most evenings so she could see her granddaughters. It had given her a focus each day.
Her failing eyesight not only robbed her of her principal pleasure, reading, but she could no longer see her beloved granddaughters on Skype. Her once mighty will was fatally eroded. Then dementia set in and within weeks she was gone.
I was lucky enough to spend a few days with her, six weeks before her death.
By that stage, she had to lug an oxygen cylinder around with her wherever she went. I made a joke about strapping it to her back like a scuba diver would.
And for the first time since my sister’s death I heard Mum laugh, a proper, hearty cackle. At the time, I thought to myself: Savour this — this could be the last time you hear her laugh. Sadly, I was right.
Mum’s death has made me reevaluate what it means to be a parent. Her endless patience with children has been an inspiration for this still slightly bad-tempered father of twins.
Her lifelong refusal to be judgmental serves as a mental wrist-slap when I err towards instant, and usually ill-founded, reactions to situations.
I miss her intellect and her guidance, but most of all I miss her unconditional love.
I can clearly remember the last time Mum called me ‘darling’; it was during one of our last Skype chats.
She said it in a coaxing way that suggested she didn’t see me as a strapping giant of a man who’ll never see 50 again, but rather as a truculent fouryear-old who loved his mother desperately, but was too proud to show it.
The pain is colossal, at times overwhelming.
But I’d rather feel this pain than feel nothing. This pain means that I loved and was loved. No matter how sad I am that she is gone, I give thanks that she was ever here at all.