I love you more than a sausage, or even a fish finger!

Writing this blog has made me reflect on my relationships with others and my past experiences which have made me who I am today. A couple of weeks ago I told my son that I loved him more than anyone in the world. He told me that he loved me more than a sausage, or even a fish finger! To him this is a very big deal – sausages and fish fingers being his two favourite foods. But in my earlier blog I was writing about how we parent and how we give unconditional love to our children. It didn’t occur to me for a moment to reflect on my own experience of parents. Those that know me know that I live with my mother now. A decision we made together last year, to offer mutual support and friendship and be there for each other but also have space to live our own lives. My relationship with my mum hasn’t always been good but that was never through her doing. She loved me unconditionally for all of my life but after I was attacked at the age of 15 I rebelled against her love and moved out of our family home. She begged me to come back and I refused which in hindsight I know made her distraught with worry. But I didn’t love myself enough to be loved by someone else.

My dad on the other hand was a different story! I didn’t know until a few years ago that my dad had mental health problems – was I aware of it as a child? I don’t think so, but who can tell. Does this mean I was pre-disposed to depression and anxiety? Quite possibly. Does it mean that I don’t have a good history of relationships with males in my life? Definitely.

My dad was and quite possibly still is a truly messed up person. Is this his fault? Almost certainly not, but it did have a profound effect on me from an early age. He treated me and my older brother completely differently – me he called his “warm fuzzy”, I got hugs and cuddles, laughter and fun. My brother wasn’t so lucky. As far as I knew I was always his golden child, I thought that he loved me unconditionally and that he would always be there for me, but sadly I was wrong. My parents divorced when I was 11 years old and at the time I remember being very matter of fact about it. If they don’t love each other, they shouldn’t be together. When I was 18 years old my dad met and married his new wife. We didn’t exactly hit it off – I thought she was a know it all and she didn’t feel like a warm person to me. But that is often said by step children isn’t it? When I got married in 2005 I was on top of the world – didn’t every girl dream of having her family around her while she pledges her love to the man she has chosen to spend her life with. I told my dad and immediately he said “I won’t give you away you know”. So matter of fact, as though I should know this without it even having to be said. When I asked him why not he said that he didn’t feel he was a good dad. This shocked me as he had always felt so wonderful to me – Warm Fuzzy – wasn’t that my relationship with him?

I started to accept it and over time I felt good about asking my mum to give me away instead. Then came my wedding day and my dad duly arrived with his wife to help us celebrate our marriage. But he sat at the back of the church and half way through the wedding meal he got up and left saying he had a long drive home. My friends and other family thought this most odd but they didn’t say too much at the time. I went away on honeymoon for 2 weeks and when I returned there was a letter on the doormat from him. My first thought was that he was writing to apologise but how wrong could I be. The letter actually told me that he had decided he didn’t like being a dad and so was cutting all ties with me. To say I was shocked would be the understatement of the year – I was devastated. I wrote back to him and begged him to come and meet with me and talk about it and he agreed. We met in a hotel bar somewhere half way between where we both lived and had a coffee together. I can recall the conversation and the setting as if it were yesterday as I had never been as disillusioned in one conversation as I was then. He told me so matter of factly that he had decided he only had enough love in his life for one person and he had decided that person was his wife. He told me it made his skin crawl when I hugged him and he felt horrible when I tried to hold his arm walking down the street. I asked him if he would care if I was run over by a bus walking out of the hotel and he said that he would be sad but that was about it. And that was that – he walked away and got in his car and I have never seen him since. If I try to contact him he ignores me – email, letters, phone calls all bounce back as he has moved house, become ex directory and changed his email address. So why am I writing about this in my blog? It isn’t to purge myself of the memory – years of therapy have already dealt with that – it is to bring us back to the question of how it happens? What happened in my poor dad’s life to make him so devoid of love for his own child that he could act in such a self destructive way? I feel so much sympathy for him because he is missing out on so much love from both me and my son and the other people in our family.


I would like to think that no person is born this way – that we are all a product of our environment. And with this in mind it brings me back to the core belief of my social enterprise roots – that everyone deserves the chance to start a fresh, be accepted for who they are in the here and now and believed in, so that they can help themselves.