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Dear Daughter

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 I was thirteen when my body changed. It was New Year’s Eve. As the clock moved closer to striking the time of change, my body shifted too, waxing waning like the moon.  So, it was here.  I had a paper round. At my time and of the month, my body would bend with the weight of the bag and the pain. This became a part of my routine, as much as the dog that snatched the newspaper angrily from the letter box at the big house where they asked me to knock instead. My body was a mystery to me, yet on that night as the clock climbed, I didn’t mind. I didn’t know that my monthly cycle would hurt so much. I didn’t know either that sometimes in the days before, I would laugh more, I might cry more, the world more vivid. I didn’t know.   My thirteenth birthday was on Christmas Eve. I don’t know the exact time of my birth. My birth mother described the early hours of the morning. I wonder if I flew into the world like you did, as if impatient to be alive, to be important.   The thought of any kind o
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Dear Daughter

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I couldn’t move at first. I curled up in a ball and I would watch the symphony of birds pass in the distance of my bedroom window. I could see the moors of West Yorkshire in the distance, at once beautiful and brutal.  When I was small, I saw the little dark hut on the moor, interrupting the landscape. I imagined it was a witch’s house. I thought of her living there alone up on the moor, unbothered by the rest of us below, living solitary in her power.  There were gaps in my life as a child. I filled them with my imagination. There were people that I came from, but did not know. At about the age you are now, at twelve I think, though it is difficult to remember, I was given papers.  I learnt that the woman who gave birth to me was of an attractive appearance, a nurse. My biological father has a name that seemed too long, it was Irish and Catholic and I think they like to name their children with some aplomb.  The papers said that the woman was advised to end her pregnancy with me. When
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Dear Daughter

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 I’m writing this from the living room. I want to write to you every day if I can, to show you how much you were missed in the years in between us.  Today I don’t have much to say. Some days the grief is overwhelming. There are days like this when all I can say is that I am thinking of you and that you are missed.  The pain of being apart from you can weigh heavy. It is an ache from my fingertips, to my toes. It settles at the bottom of my stomach and rests there.  I don’t hide this pain now to be seen as brave or in fear that it could be said I crumbled without you.  A pain such as this cannot be number or hidden or imagined away. I wait instead for it to pass.  I know if our separation hurts me like this, then it must have physical effects on you. I think that is why, every time the weight of the pain of missing you subsides, I feel the love and compassion I have for you and it wills me to go on.  The depth of suffering they have plunged us both into will meet every time the fathoms
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Dear Daughter

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 How do you spend your days? I often wonder this. You, who I knew so well, whose precious smell I breathe in each days for eight golden years, are now a mystery to me. Across water, in another country, your body changes, the bones of your face knit together in new and splendid ways.  Who are you now? You are always you of course. Are we born with our own esence? I believe so and thus I know that although you change and grow, you are always you and in this way you are always known to me.  ‘Why did I choose you to be Mummy?’ you once asked, perhaps age three, bent against me in the liquid moments of slowness before sleep. You were afraid to fall asleep alone and would often want me there to hold your hand as you fell into the unknown, the land of dreams. You held onto me, as though I might catch you if you should fall.  I read you fairytales. I love them still. I sew small creatures in their memory and in memory of the time together we knew once. I love Cinderella most of all, a girl who
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Dear Daughter

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 I often feel like I forgot something, like I left the iron on or didn’t do something I should have. Its the switch that is turned on when you become a mother. I think your body knows to always watch when you birth a child.  So I wonder where you are and what you are doing. I haven’t heard from you in a few days. I wonder how cold it is there, whether you are wrapped up warm enough. I wonder a lot.  The stress of the pandemic is affecting children, the news says. They don’t talk about the stress of years of separation for children like you though. For a while, the BBC touched on this, in the documentary I did with them, but I wish they had touched more upon the harm to your mental health.  Although we got some contact, out years of separation have had few interruptions and I truly hope one day the cost of long term separation from mothers will be addressed.  A few months back, you appeared in a dream, your four year old self, in a little brown coat embroidered at the pockets.  I waited
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A Mother Apart

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 Hello and welcome to A Mother Apart. This is the diary of a mother forced to live apart from her child. 
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