I come from a long line of dysfunction on both sides of my family. My parents were so ill-equipped to be out in the world alone, let alone ready for raising a child or five. My Dad was the second to youngest in a family of nine children. When he was three years old the children were all taken into care as the local mining industry up North had collapsed leaving hundreds of families destitute. My grandparents could no longer feed or provide for them. The historical pictures of the time show whole communities living in poverty, children running the streets without shoes or adequate clothing, the miners depressed and desperate. My dad and the two brothers above him aged five and seven were put into the same children’s home, the others were scattered to the four winds. They were never to see their parents or siblings again. The children’s home was more of a workhouse. The children were cruelly treated, starved, and made to work for hours every day. They didn’t attend school and were given only the most basic reading and writing skills. Life was loveless, brutal, harsh, and abusive. That was my dad’s childhood from the age of three. Imagine those poor little boys, so desperate for love, for comfort, and receiving nothing but endless misery. Eventually, as all three brothers grew old enough to leave one by one, they found work in the local mills and moved into a rented house together. My Dad’s name is Frank. By all accounts he was very handsome, tall, slim, always trying to make the ladies laugh, and obviously no clue that he was deeply damaged. He knew nothing about love, or relationships, or how to overcome his past. He didn’t even know there was anything to overcome. He had no education, skills, and prospects, but he was funny and kind and lived a simple life working at the mill, chatting up the women at work, smoking, gambling, and relishing the fact he was free from his life of abuse.
My Mum grew up as one of ten children living on a farm in rural Ireland. There was poverty, incest, neglect, and starvation, and no one around to save her. The Catholic community filled her with terror and tales of fire and brimstone. Her teachers were violent and disinterested, preferring punishment to education. There was no escape. At home, her mother was constantly pregnant and neglected the children she already had. There is no doubt she also grew up in an abusive home and her mental health issues meant she was never able to mother her children adequately. She had been married off at seventeen to a man in his forties, my grandfather, and spent the next thirty years pregnant, working on the farm and turning a blind eye to the needs of her children. From the age of five, my mum had to walk several miles to and from school every day come rain or shine, on an empty stomach that may have been empty for more than a day or two. She would often faint and feel lightheaded from lack of food but nobody ever intervened. She had the shame of being teased and bullied for not wearing any underwear, wearing hand-me-down clothes, and shoes that had holes in. The lack of nurturing was devastating. She had no bed of her own and would sleep on chairs pulled together or on the floor with rats and mice crawling over her at night. Worse things were also crawling over her at night. She was sexually abused by her older brothers as far back as she can remember. Night after night. Nowhere safe, no one to protect her, no comfort, no escape, no ending to it. She had no access to sanitary products and my heart breaks to think of her monthly struggles. She was forced to leave school at fourteen to work on the farm full time, removing her from the outside world even more. Her oldest sister had been living and working in England for a couple of years and urged my mum to do the same as soon as she could. At seventeen she answered an ad in the local paper asking for young Irish girls to work in a care home for the elderly in Birmingham. She got the job and off she went. My Mum’s name is Tess. and despite her terrible start in life, she was kind and caring, and loving. After several years of working and saving she decided to join her younger sister who had moved from Ireland to the north of England and they moved in together. Her sister was working in the same mill as Frank. Mills were always the main industry in the north and at that time, in the late fifties/early sixties, almost anyone looking for work could find a job there. It didn’t take long before Frank and Tess met and all the stars collided. I’d like to say it was a beautiful love story but it really wasn’t. They were both in their early twenties, naive and full of longing to be special to someone but mostly full of unbridled lust with not a clue about love. And then Tess realized she was pregnant because of course contraception was the work of the devil and she would burn in the fiery pits of hell for even thinking about it. So there I was a tiny spec of humanity created in all innocence, growing inside my sacred sanctum, little knowing that generations of dysfunction would press down on me from the moment I was born but that I would overcome it all. Eventually.
I’m going to share my journey. My feelings. My struggles. Finding my way back home hasn’t been easy. Learning how to break the chains of the past takes courage and strength. Learning to love yourself means breaking yourself open time and time again. It’s a painful process and one that I know will be familiar to so many of you. Being a chain breaker makes you a warrior. Have you been the one who has changed things for the generations of your family still to come? Do you want to be? Do you need help to know how to do it? What’s your story?