Growing up in Everton during my infant and primary school years seemed void of sentimentality. The wounds of the war years were not solely received on the battlefield. My mother and father had dumped me at a time of my deep neccessity for love. I was three when I found neither parent available to me and was bereft of both physical and mental parential attention. I may as well have been left on some stranger,s doorstep in a carrier bag;
thank God that abortions were tricky, (old wives tales didn,t work, I,m alive to prove it) messy and difficult to negotiate.
In my most tender years I thought that if left in my mother,s care, I,d have been starved, beaten or even poisoned to death. Anything to get rid of this dirty, crying third mouth to feed.
I grew up wanting desperately to be mothered. Wanting to be liked if I couldn,t be loved. Tolerated if I couldn,t have friendship. An acquaintance if I couldn,t have have acceptability.
Nobody ever told me why I was given away at such an early age. Was I a crying baby? Was I a mistake? Was I even my father,s, and a disgraced feotus within my mother,s womb?
Time has proven a great healer, and, whilst still a teenager and fresh from school, I tracked down the woman they called "my mother" to a large flat in Rock Ferry, a particularly sorded district of Birkenhead.
Throughout my life I,ve recalled a phrase she used that day. On finding that she had no milk for a cup of tea, and volunteering to go looking for a shop that was open to buy a bottle, she called from her doorstep after me,"You will come back...Won,t you?"
It may have been this pitiful remark that helped me through the years to cleanse and heal the unfeeling I had for her for getting rid of me, and giving me to someone else who couldn,t support or afford to keep me in the way that young sons and daughters are supposed to be reared.
Many years later on seeing "mother" on her death bed, surprisingly looking better than I,ve ever seen her in the past. Cheeks rosy and hair brushed back, I thought about the miserably short life that she had lead and the loveless marriage that she must have had to end up alone on a hospital bed with no family all around, holding hands, grieving, mourning the mother she should have been.
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I think the most endearing words that I heard at the funeral was, "thank God shes,s gone."
Nobody is supposed to love you like your mum and dad. The love of a partner can fade with time, often it does; But the love of a parent --- or at least of a good parent --- is with you forever. You can,t lose it no matter how selfish or stupid you sometimes might be. And when a parent dies, it is like the brightest light in your life has just gone out, snuffed out at a pinch.
Anyone losing a parent to cancer or Alzeimers knows that it,s cruelty is boundless. In the end these diseases narrow life down to pain, suffering and humiliation.
To see someone you love go through that breaks your heart. When death finally comes, at least you know that the person you loved is free from suffering.
But why is it still so very hard to say goodbye, in an intensive care ward, to a mother that never was?
written in 1980 after the Christmas death of my mother.
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