Family Values

My little girl went back to her Dad’s tonight.

For the last 10 weeks or so she's been with me almost full time. We got on one another's nerves a lot, but tonight, when I look at her empty bed, tears well up and I feel the familiar splintering of my heart... A part of me screams ‘It’s not fair!’ whilst the other soothes with calm rational logic… ‘She’s OK with her Dad’ and ‘It’s good for you to have some time to yourself’.

Times like these I need a cuddle and I notice the empty half of my bed. One voice pipes up with ‘It’s just sex… that’s ALL you’re missing out on, and BTW don’t forget all the muddle; the emotional complications (all the things your friend’s whinge about!)’
The other voice, weaned on fairy stories and princesses that awake from deep slumber, wonders whether ‘You’ve just never experienced true love!’. Maybe there’s more to it than sharing a cup of tea and the paper on the weekend… maybe there really is such a thing as a ‘perfect fit’? A puzzle piece that might plug the gap and make peace of my eternal disquiet?

Then I pull myself together, remembering that lovers do not necessarily good nurturers make. What I need is a Mum. And again I’m overwhelmed with longing, fear, grief…

Last month we found out Mum has bowel cancer; this week she started chemo. In forcing myself to imagine the possibility of her not being with us forever, I start to list all the things that I wish were different between us.

I crave a closeness we haven’t shared for a long, long time. I know she loves me but, being me, I want more. I want her to accept my sexuality; my non-existent girlfriend; my yet-to-be-conceived baby… I want her to really ‘get me’… to come on the adventure with me (even if she secretly thinks the way I’m going about it is ‘a recipe for disaster’).

But, in articulating all this, I realise, once again, I'm making it all about me. So %$#!! self-indulgent! AND I want her to talk through the whole thing with me ON CAMERA!

I hope I never have a child like me!

Or maybe… maybe I’m pushing it in an effort to make our relationship the best that it can be. With my family, so adept at shoving things under the carpet, conversations on camera seem to have more depth and insight than many of the superficial ‘in transit’ ones we have every day… that’s why I’m doing it… so we can connect… captured for time immemorial on a tiny flip-out monitor.

Maybe then I won’t feel so alone. And, if I can help my family get it, get me… GET US… then maybe, slowly the ripples will spread, slowly, slowly, the world will change…

And my little girl won’t have to grow up feeling alone, like she doesn’t fit… I hope that she has no need to hide who she really is, or where she came from or whom she loves…