Dear Daughter

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 she didn’t, she was told she couldn’t keep me. There were many unanswered questions, intermittent stays in hospitals for those with mental illness. The information posed questions, what caused this mental pain? Who was this woman and how could she work full time as a nurse yet be told she was unfit to care for her own baby. 

She refused to let me go at first. Then he did too. He asked to have me himself and was told it would not be possible. Later on, he asked for pictures of the baby he had lost. 

I didn’t know then, as the tears dropped onto paper, what would have later. I didn’t know that my child would be left to wonder who I was, to be forced to fill the gaps in her imagination with her own stories too. 

Perhaps this is why I like to write so much. I have been telling stories in my head for many years since the world left out the chapters. 

As the birds form a line across the window, to dance in a beautiful circle across the sky, I wonder why my life did the same dance again and again, why I became the mother in my story too, why I, well read and called clever by teachers, often working multiple jobs at a time to have a better life, why I too became someone accused of being unfit of caring for my own child. 

Perhaps this is the cruelest part of it all. Your father knew of where my story started, would stroke my head as I whispered my fears to him while you kicked in my belly. He knew of that white faced baby in the children’s home, so damaged by loss that it refused to learn to speak, that it recoiled from people. 

He knew of the child I once was, so hurt by the loss of separation that they were screened for various mental or physical abnormalities. He knew of a child whose simple pain and loss were pathologists as though they were an illness. He knew that in place of my biological ties I was forced to become a character within my own story. 

When he wanted to deliver the greatest hurt, he knew what to do. 

Love Mummy