Can a child be born bad ? I don't think so. But I think sometimes, maybe when a parent is very controlling, a child gets labelled bad because they fail to fall in line with the parent is unable to stiffen them into the shape they desire. My granny, my father's mother mentioned once that her daughter, my father's older sister, was difficult with food & that made her bad. My sister is currently pursuing a narrative that her daughter was always difficult, tho this line of talking seems to have come up since my niece accused my sister's partner of touching her inappropriately when she was a minor. In childhood i was the rubbish child, my oldest sister was clever & pretty, the prize winner, daddy's child, the pet of my aunt & my mother's parents, my other sister was beautiful & good, i was plain & dull & i grew up feeling that i was unlovable. I never felt loved until i met Jon, he let me see myself as someone worthy of love. 

Growing up feeling myself to be unlovable, unworthy of love or care, a person that people would rather wasn't there was difficult. I think my parents were stuck in a loveless marriage & that maybe the third child, another daughter rather than the son i should have been, was a pressure that tipped the relationship over the edge. My mum stuck in the country, away from the job she had loved & the parents who supported her, with three small children was maybe only just keeping her head above water. My dad in a new job with a wife who wasn't used to keeping house & caring for children was perhaps coasting. I don't know. I suppose i just know that i felt like a wrong party. I believe that my parents are not bad people, children got spanked in those days but we weren't beaten, & tho i vividly recall, as a very young child, being dragged out of my chair at family meals by my mother & pulled up the stairs by one arm & locked in my bedroom, the sound of the slide of the lock still rings in my ears, this was not all of my life, there are memories of flowers, animals, art-making & baking too. 

But the sense of being an unlovable person, someone the world would be better without, sits deep in my body & is worse when i am forced into close proximity with my background as i am at the moment with my mother ill. The person who most provokes these feelings is my oldest sister, tho i will give my mum, my niece, my other sister, my older children's father & even my children (because i thought they might be better off without me) credit for triggering suicidal thoughts too. Suicide is part of my family's picture. My father's sister, Betty, committed suicide a couple of years before i was born. She was rarely spoken of except in reference to being the mother of Colin our much older cousin who lived in Australia or maybe New Zealand I can't recall which. I believe it was a gas oven suicide, you will have to refer to my older sister's research to verify this. The methods i have seriously considered are hanging myself & stepping on to a rail crossing. Other methods have been considered. I sincerely hope that i am resilient enough & have enough here that is not my back family to stop me from pursuing these ends but perhaps that is another reason why i am blogging, to give myself release as i am conscious that dark thoughts are gaining a foothold in me & i am frightened. 

I was chatting this week with my mum in hospital. She has a bad cough, phlegmy & deep, tho she seems to be pulling phlegm up it is clearly also sitting in her lungs. For a long time colds have gone to her chest. People seem to have weak places in their bodies where ill health gravitates when they are at low ebb. For me it is my nerves & my mind, i spin out & my mind runs like wild fire, only solitude & silence give me respite, i have to limit the time i spend with others & i tend to make art that is white. It is my body's call for peace i think. This is where i am now but my mother's needs are forcing me into interaction with the people who make me feel worst. How can i meet the needs of the situation whilst also safeguarding my own need to be well ? 

These blog posts are clearly not an academic family history. Here & there i pop in a scrap of information about some other party but really its about me isn't it. I know that i am motivated in part by my need to set my internal dialogue down in writing so i can cut loose from it but maybe also there is ego, a desire to have my story on a page. I think about all the celebrities & politicians who have written or had ghost written their autobiography & had them published in hardback with shiny covers, what makes them think that people will be interested. My mother said about my sister's family history "who cares?" one of my sons said he thought she was writing it because the dead are easier to have relationship with than the living. I wonder if maybe she is doing it to make herself important to future generations, the writer of our past. I guess that is why i am making my mark because i surely know that i'll be written out of her family history, or written in such a manner that mirrors my worth to her which is zilch & i don't want my sister, who is unkind to me & about me & has no children of her own, to be master of how generations sprung from my body are witness to the story that she & I share so i plant my seed here.