Life’s been wretched — and it’s all the fault of my mum

DEAR BEL, I WAS born in 1945: my mother, 19, my father an American serviceman. I don’t think he ever knew.

She doesn’t think it important for me to know anything about him; she only seems to care about herself and the stigma she suffered.

My grandfather and step-grandmother consented to bring me up. Step-gran also had her own daughter, then five, and also my mother’s brother, 24. I was very much second in her eyes — which has impacted on me during my life.

Two years later, my mother got pregnant again — to a married man. This time she was banished to work in a hospital nearby.

After my brother was born, Mum was allowed to keep him in a cot in her hospital room, breastfeeding, knowing he was to be adopted. One day she found him gone. Six months old. I weep when I think of this.

When I was eight, my mother married (pregnant again) and they lived with her new husband’s parents. I went, too, but it was a disaster and after seven weeks I was returned to my grandparents, stayed for four years until mother and stepfather got a council house, then went back to them. They now had a daughter, aged five.

Mother and stepfather never stopped criticising me. I became a British Airways stewardess (me with my inferiority complex!) for 17 years, earning a good salary. When I went back to the family in their council house, she sneered: ‘Just because you have all the money.’

I heard her telling neighbours BA probably only took me because they were running low on recruits! Why always belittle me?

I’d also like you to explain the reasons I was so needy and chased men through my best years — and even when they rejected me, I carried on. It plays on my conscience and since I still meet up with some of these friends, I am acutely embarrassed, as some of the husbands were privy to my bad behaviour and, at the time (the Seventies), treated me with contempt.

Divorced, I’ve shown my wonderful adult children love and affection and am grateful that I can.

My sister lives nearby. My mother is now 92 and nearly blind. I visit periodically, but hate it, as my mother talks only of her awful past. I don’t think she loves me, only herself. I can’t forgive and have lost all feelings for her.

The cards I was dealt at birth and through childhood have ruined my life, and I do feel some bitterness towards my mother. Can you pacify my tortured mind? TESSA

First, i want readers (bound to be full of sympathy for you) to know i’ve had to edit your original email from 2,341 words to 428.

the whole sad saga reads like the synopsis for a bleak modern novel — one in which the tragic theme is ‘the sins of the fathers’ and misery handed on.

the key omission here is your mother’s early life — which i’ll sum up as poverty-stricken and unloved. Her mother died when she was four, her stepmother was ‘harsh’ and there was no praise in her life, no more than in yours.

that’s the background to her fling with an American... and the start of the life which you call ‘ruined’. Did she think you ‘ruined’ her life?

Perhaps every time you asked about your father, you inadvertently rubbed salt in her wounds. You present her rejection of your wish to know as evidence of selfishness — but might it not also suggest old trauma?

You suggest your own inferiority complex started there in childhood, in the cold, critical atmosphere at home.

surely it must have had the same effect on your mother, leading her to make reckless choices with men? You wonder why you were so promiscuous (i supply that word, reading between

the lines), but can you see a pattern here?

With zero self-confidence, women are likely to be ‘needy’ — saying yes to anyone who asks, grateful for the attention. Guilt over this aspect of past behaviour is really bothering you.

Therefore I ask you to confront it, reflect on how hard it was for your mother in an age when women really were judged, recognise the pattern — and now try really hard to forgive her as well as yourself.

Surely there is nothing else to do at this stage of your life? I completely understand how hard it will be.

You had a terrible childhood: unwanted, shoved from pillar to post, picked on and never really loved. That’s so desperately sad — but I pity both the scared, unwed mother and the resented baby who took away her youth. Remember

none of this is your fault. On the contrary, you were a victim of sad circumstance, yet still made something of your life. even if your marriage failed, it gave you two children — for whom you found wellsprings of love you’d never before experienced.

Ill-treated, your mother passed on her misery to you. Treated badly in turn, you gave your children a good life. Untaught, you

created love. That should be proof your precious life is not ‘ruined’.

You bitterly detest visits to your 92-year-old mother and say you have ‘lost all feelings for her’.

and yet . . . when you think of the ostracised 21-year-old returning to her room to discover her baby son taken away, you ‘weep’.

So in spite of all your anger, bitterness and grief you still have some empathy for the woman who gave birth to you in shame. Focus on that feeling, and even weep some more — for both of you.

Reading your story, I feel boundless pity for one motherless child (your mother) and for another (you) who was never mothered.

But stronger than that is my admiration for you — because you have used those bad cards you were dealt to set yourself in charge of your own good life.