07/10/2026
Another year has passed, and so much healing and growth has happened for me. I’ve never felt safer, more valued, or at home in myself. Life isn’t perfect, but the weight of grief, of loss, of shame isn’t crushing me.
Dear Mum,
It’s been a year since you passed, and what a year it has been. Your words echo in my head most days, leaving me gripping my head tightly and screaming into pillows, trying to drown you out.
I’ve grieved the countless losses, the deprivation, abuse, and neglect, and has candid conversations with others who knew you best. Ironically we barely felt like we knew you at all. We’re on the other side of middle age, and yet so much of us feels like broken children, bashed against the rocks of the unpredictable, damaging waves. You were cold, cruel, and calculating.
I don’t remember a time where you weren’t aggressively pushing me to forgive, everyone except you, because of course, you didn’t know, didn’t remember, so it didn’t count. I heard every lecture, despite my best efforts to dissociate, your voice cut through the fog and distance.
I listened to you tell me that emotions were a choice, that I could choose not to feel anger, hurt, frustration, pain, loss. I worked so hard to try not to feel, and all I lost was the ability to connect to people, even my own children. You stole that connection long before either was even born.
When I hit the ‘post’ button to share this, it will be at the exact time you took that final breath that sucked the air from the room. What I have to say isn’t to shame, blame or humiliate - it’s to bring the breath back into my body, to allow me to truly live. I’ve spent the year feeling, sitting with the 43 years of excruciating abuse and neglect, and facing things I couldn’t while you lived, or I couldn’t have given you what you needed in your life.
So Mum, I listened, and I heard. I need to forgive. I choose to forgive. I choose to forgive me.
I forgive me for degrading myself, sacrificing everything, in hopes that you might one day love me. I forgive me for fawning, for caving, just to stop the screeching or prevent the deafening silence. I forgive me for begging for your forgiveness when you’d slap my face or pull my hair for standing up to you. I forgive me for not standing up to you nearly enough.
I forgive me for returning to Alice as a teen, when my escape plan didn’t work out. You gloated that I couldn’t survive without you, and I believed you. I forgive me for believing you.
I forgive me for getting on that train and returning home, pregnant with my daughter, because again you told me I’d fail without you. You told me I wasn’t maternal enough, or able to love enough, so I had to come home so you could take over, give up more of your life. I forgive me for believing you, for caving into your demands. I forgive me for absorbing the narrative that I was not only unloveable but incapable of love. I forgive me for allowing you to dictate how to raise my children, when everything went against my own values. I forgive me for my cowardice, and the harm it cost us all.
I forgive me for sacrificing my life, allowing you to wreak havoc in mine so you’d leave the boys’ marriages and lives alone. I allowed you to spin the lines of my dysfunction and chaos creating because it gave you place and purpose - I forgive me for this, even though it’s like chewing on broken glass to this day. I still carry this label, the cost of your actions continues to deny me a family, and I let you do it. Forgiving me for an ongoing harm is hard.
I forgive me for creating a life void of romantic love, because I couldn’t shake off your words. The words that said “I never had that, why should you?” when it came to anything good in my life. I don’t understand how you couldn’t want far more for us than what you had - I love seeing my kids achieve and experience things beyond my reach, because it means there’s growth, and change, and generational legacy healing. I laugh with joy seeing them exploring the world, trying new things, pushing through their own anxiety because of the possibilities awaiting them. I forgive me for depriving myself of living a rich, full life in spite of your resounding resentment and sabotage.
I don’t regret the years of caring for you as much as it might feel that way in the rubble of loss. I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me. I did it to prove to myself I wasn’t beyond love, beyond nurture, because care, kindness or compassion. I did it because everyone is deserving of basic human dignity, and I was the only one left. I did it to prove to myself that I could love in the face of hate and disappointment.
I hate what it cost my children though, and that’s something I’ll never be able to make right, not in the way I long to. I regret they didn’t get to see me in anything beyond survival mode, of constantly in heightened fight/flight/freeze, but mostly fawn. I regret that in varying degrees they bought into your narrative of my fundamental defectiveness. I regret and hold more grief than they’ll ever know the loss of the safety, the peace, the responsiveness, and the joy I longed to flood their lives with. You were the dam in our family, holding back the abundance of love. I was a dam, too, holding back as much of the toxicity and cruelty from you.
I forgive me for covering for you, for publicly praising you instead of actively removing you from our lives. I forgive me for caving, for keeping the peace, in a desperate attempt to minimise the carnage for my kids. I forgive me for losing myself just trying to survive, instead of choosing to live no matter the cost.
I forgive Mum, I forgive me, for those things and countless more. I forgive me for believing you when you said I was hard to love.
It’s been a year since you passed, and now it’s time to let you go. As soon as I’m financially able I’ll take the rest of your ashes home to Alice, where we’ll say our final goodbye, but until then, it’s goodbye. I’m not the daughter you wanted, I never was, and I refuse to be the daughter I became in your lifetime another day.
I hope you found what you believed in, what you sold me to have. I hope you’re at peace, that you’re no longer afraid and feeling alone: I hope you’ve found gentleness and safety.
You loved me the best you could, but I’ve got it from here. I choose to love myself, to value myself, and to build a life far beyond anything I could ever have hoped for as a young child in your care. It starts today, because I forgive me.
