Do you remember when we were a family, when our parents loved us, and each other? Was it an illusion? I don't even know. Maybe it was just an illusion, but it definitely did feel real to me. Did it feel real to you, too?
Do you remember playing make-believe games together with a crappy raggedy beanbag doll, wearing tights on our heads? We played together for hours and hours. We didn't need computers or gadgets, or even the television. We made up nonsensical songs and poetry. We had our own private phrases and our own silly language. We listened to rubbish songs on cassette tape, and built makeshift dens out of sun loungers and blankets. We did stupid kid stuff that sisters do. We were a team. We loved each other so much. I was sometimes a bit of a shit, like big sisters can be, but I'd have laid down my life for you.
Family Sundays at the Polish Club with Cokes and crisps for you and me, and beers or Guinness with roll-ups for the grown-ups, who seemed to have a good marriage, and who seemed to love their kids. A perfectly functional family. So it seemed. We had a lovely, affectionate black and white cat called Lucy who slept under the covers with us (and even mother loved her). Matching dresses on Christmas Day. Regular holidays in Plymouth, which would soon become even more regular, and less sweet.
Lucy the cat got killed by a car, and then a short time later, grandad died. Mother was devastated, of course - she was a daddy's girl, just like you and me were. I remember watching our dear old gran sobbing her heart out while reading through the pile of sympathy cards, just a short time before they were due to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. I thought to myself: I hope I never love someone like she loved him, because the pain of losing that person must be too much to bear.
And then something else died, and it was even worse.
Do you remember the night we heard our mother crying and we crept downstairs in the dark to investigate? Do you remember dad looking ashen, trying to comfort her? Dad said: "Go back to bed, girls. Please just go back to bed." I remember his face, his voice. Neither of them needed to say a word to us to let us know what was going on. They'd had arguments before, plenty of them, but this was different. Do you remember that we both cried too, because we KNEW it was something bad, something really, really bad this time? You were still just a baby, you had barely started school. It was 1985. I don't recall the month; maybe early autumn.
Everything unravelled from here. The illusion of happiness, of functionality, was ripped apart at the seams.
Do you remember how you felt the day dad left? Do you remember crying inconsolably every time that ad came on television (I think it was a British Gas ad), with the song "You are the sunshine of my life"? Do you remember that you were so shell-shocked, desolate and heartbroken, because you thought dad was lonely and that we might lose him forever?
You were still just a baby but you perceived more than I did. Maybe I just blocked it out. Maybe that's why I've managed to escape with a few precious scraps of dignity and sanity.
Do you remember our mother telling us that dad was a liar, a gambler, a traitor and a terrible husband and father? That he had let the family down, betrayed us all? She told us, her shattered and completely innocent children, that our dad was suicidal, that he had contemplated throwing himself on the train tracks. What. The. Fuck. Our mental health has never been of any consequence to her, has it? Do you remember she once convinced one of her friends to sit us down for a 'little chat', to persuade us to "try to be good girls for your mum", to try to understand what our poor mother was going through?
Do you remember that nobody, not once, not ever, asked us how WE FELT?
Do you remember The Fear? Do you remember feeling relieved/glad whenever I was the one who ended up on the receiving end of our mother's unpredictable rages? (Don't be embarrassed to admit it; I felt relieved whenever it was you....
...Apart from when you were really little and she hit you and screamed at you for wetting the bed. I didn't feel glad or relieved then. I felt sick.)
"Why don't you just go and live with your father?" Mother would say to us, regularly, even when we were still reeling from the aftermath of the divorce. "He's the one who wanted kids. Go on, get out of my sight."
And do you remember staying with dad some weekends after the divorce and feeling so much more ALIVE than when we lived at 'home' with mother? Even though the poor man must have been at rock-bottom during the late 1980s and early 1990s (and beyond), because he was being battered and battered and battered, mentally, spiritually and emotionally, relentlessly, by the same woman who was battering us. DO YOU REMEMBER? At a time when all of us were vulnerable, terrified, traumatised; when all we needed was support, kindness, understanding, patience, LOVE... what did we get? WHAT DID WE GET?
You almost died when you were six and got that horrendous rare disease that I will not even attempt to spell because I can't even pronounce it. Two years after that, I got diagnosed with diabetes, and that's the last time I remember our mother offering me any kind of motherly support. It was the last time I looked in her eyes and saw concern, and a glimpse of something that might even pass for love. Because soon after that, I became a teenager, and so wasn't really a child any more. I became much harder to manipulate. I was an autonomous human being on the cusp of becoming an adult, and I had needs, opinions, desires and perceptions all of my own, and mother HATED that.
She HATED lots of things. More than anything, she hated being a single mother, she hated being 'poor' and she hated not being the centre of dad's universe any more (although she guilt-tripped and slagged him off him daily, with relish). She hated and resented us for being alive and therefore enforcing that ignominious half-life of single motherhood on her (she didn't ask for this! She didn't deserve it!), and she HATED our dad for what he did, and she made sure you and I felt the full force of that burning hatred every single day. We bore the brunt of the blame for EVERYTHING, and she used us to attack and hurt dad.
My puberty and burgeoning adolescence coincided with her menopause, and the concurrency of those two events was catastrophic. Every day living in that house with that woman killed me just a little bit more. Before I turned 16, I was just about suicidal. Only my best friend and boyfriend noticed the change in me, and I probably owe them both my life. Mother called me a slut (and increased the frequency and severity of her other abuses) when I fell pregnant, and she literally could not contain her glee when I miscarried in the summer of 1992. I have never in my life needed the love and support of a caring, compassionate mother more than I did at that time. But her hatred for me simply intensified. So I didn't want to go on living any more. I despised my life; I despised myself. That woman we were forced to live with, the woman who made us feel guilty for merely existing, abused us so regularly that we became trained to feel grateful and grovelling on the vanishingly rare occasions she actually behaved like a mother should. (Which she did, carefully and cunningly, whenever we were 'in respectable company'.)
So while our spirits and bodies were being pummelled furiously behind closed doors, the rest of the world thought she was coping admirably. What a strong, courageous woman!
Except she's not. She's an abomination. The fucking lies, distortions and denials we had to put up with, as her daughters... It was even more brutal than the beatings.
Our paternal grandmother died in 1994, and dad was no longer just lonely, he was also absolutely alone. Nobody could even have guessed it at the time, but even then, his psychopathic brother, our sub-human 'uncle', was undoubtedly scheming about how he and his sordid, repulsive wife might maximise their financial benefits when our dad eventually died of alcoholism. They knew, much more than we did, that his addiction was bound to kill him long before he would have the chance to watch his grandchildren grow up. It's impossible for me to find the words to express how much I hate them. While our mother murdered and desecrated our dad's soul while he was physically alive, those two contemptible fucks shat all over his memory once he'd died. All three of them are the worst examples of evil I have ever encountered; each uniquely twisted and malevolent in their own stinking, remorseless way.
Our half-sister died in 1997. The tragedy of her death was almost eclipsed by the incessant terror and fragility of her life - rejected by society, brutalised by drugs and immoral people, deprived of her babies, and neglected, shunned, dismissed from birth by the one person who was supposed to prioritise and protect her above everything. Is it any fucking wonder she went 'mad'?
Ten years later, just a few months after he retired, our dad died. It was a terrible shock, but the only real surprise was that he held on for as long as he did. Right in front of you, he gave up and keeled over.
Then gran died a couple of years after that. Our mother mourned the loss of her much-loved, devoted mum, and you and I mourned the loss of a truly warm, wonderful and loving grandmother... While both of us wondered HOW THE FUCK such a devoted, warm, wonderful, loving (if slightly formidable and old-fashioned) woman had managed to produce the sick, broken and psychotic child abuser and rotten-to-the-core hypocrite that was our own mother.
Then, in 2010, two days before your 30th birthday, your husband died of an aggressive brain tumour. An unimaginably cruel illness robbed you of your soulmate, and again, right in front of your eyes.
Throughout all of this, just as it was throughout your childhood, you have been conditioned to believe you are worthless by the same person who made me feel worthless, who made our half-sister feel worthless, who made our dad feel worthless. Your feelings don't matter. You're an irrelevance; you're insignificant. You're invisible, or at least it would be better if you were invisible, because you're so hideous, and such a mistake, an aberration, an embarrassment. That's how I felt, too, for almost thirty years, until I finally realised that the problem wasn't me. It was never me. It was never you. It was never dad, and it was never that poor tormented soul who took her own life almost twenty years ago.
How much pain can one person take, sis? My heart aches for you. You are in a world of unendurable hurt but it's the denial that will fuck you. It's sucked the life out of your soul already; you are a stranger to me. I do not know the person you have become and I am not sure I even want to know her.
Maybe you've had your memories pushed out, trivialised or negated by self-serving lies and manipulations.
I get it.
It wears you down until you don't even fucking know who you are any more, or how you're supposed to feel.
But I do remember. And I'll never forget.
I can't believe it's come to this, but it has. Despite everything, you've let her win and I'll probably never know why. But I will not waste another second of my life agonising over it. I will NOT live in denial, and I will not allow that woman's delusional poison to stunt my growth and restrict my chance for a good life any more.
I wish you luck, and I wish you happiness. I hope happiness is possible for you, because the sister I know and love, the one I REMEMBER so fondly, deserves all the happiness in the world.
I'll always love you, even if I will never be a part of your life again.
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