MORNING SERIAL
I WAS left alone in my early teenage years to witness my relatively familiar life unravel messily and turn into something that felt completely alien.
My father quickly re-married and Mum became more interested in finding a companion and fulfilling her romantic ambitions than in family life. This was understandable.
Motherhood was a long-haul – a life-long commitment – and she had not secured the things she needed and expected from the whole deal.
Also, her family was now just the three of us: her, my gran who lived with us, and me. Mum was relatively free and relatively lonely.
Frequently, she drew me in and made me her friend. We talked about all sorts of things.
However, I could not depend on this friendship. I could not be sure if she was truly available to me, or predict whether or not she would stand in my corner.
Perhaps I needed my mother to be something else, not a friend. I didn’t know, at the time, about something called ‘emotional holding’.
I had not considered consistency. When I was a teenager it was convenient and rather cool to be granted complete freedom to stray away from home. Mum didn’t seem to worry about me at all.
Whenever I revisited the story of my early life I felt I was reading between the lines, vaguely aware of things that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
At the time all I knew was how I felt inside myself. I tended to trust my gut feeling and respond accordingly when possible, as my generation were encouraged to do.
Despite her laissez-faire attitude towards my comings and goings my mother seemed to follow a strict set of principles about how certain things should be: I ought to think like this, or should not feel that, and if I did, I shouldn’t express it.
I wasn’t sure where these rather cerebral ideas had come from, but Mum seemed certain they were correct.
They were her rules and I was living under her roof.
Scrabble in the Afternoon by Biddy Wells is published by Parthian at £8.99.
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