A Mother Apart




 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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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....
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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...
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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 preg...
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