Getting to know us...

So today was a rather uneventful day in the life of mother and daughter so I will take this opportunity to tell you more about our relationship.

I refer back to the abnormality of our relationship, which I mentioned yesterday. My mother, born in Portugal, moved to South Africa when she was 20. She married my father, a rather British South African, when she was 25 and had me when she was 28. I don't think she ever wanted to have children. She was a young, extremely beautiful air hostess and was pushed into having a family by my father who had always wanted a large family.

They divorced when I was 3 years old, my mother was 28. We lived alone together in a small house in the suburbs of Johannesburg and I remember her to be a very kind and loving mother as a young child. She worked very hard to do her best to look after me but often lived the life of a single lady with many admirers. To this day that always made me feel rather uncomfortable. Although her boyfriends (and there were a few) were always nothing but lovely to me - she made sure of this. I enjoyed their attention and all the gifts they gave me to win her over. I can't say that she ever made me feel like a burden - she never did. She was away a lot on flights and took me on as many as she could without taking me out of school. I have just asked her about her studies and it turns out she was doing her Honours at that time too. I remember staying up late into the night writing her thesis.

The stresses of being a single working mother started taking their toll on her when the company she worked for underwent major changes while South Africa was coming out of the dreaded apartheid era. Her place at South African Airways was no longer secure and she was unhappy. She came home bad-tempered and used to take it out on me a lot.

I used to go and see my father who lived not too far away every other weekend. I hated going. My dad was OK but he remarried when I was 5 and my step-mother used to terrorise me. Literally. She was so unkind to me and that is when I learnt about unhappiness and fear and being inadequate. Things are different now but I remain very hurt and affected by some of the incidents that happened and my father's house.

I took the anger out on my mother and as she was going through her own - very difficult - stuff, our relationship deteriorated. As she still used to fly a lot and my step-mother refused to let my father look after me while my mother was away I stayed with my Nanna. And guess what? When it was time to go to Secondary school the step-mother arranged for the little girl to go off to boarding school. This broke my mother's heart. And broke my head, if it wasn't broken already.

In my first year of Secondary school my mother met a lovely French man called Alain and they have been together ever since. He had been more than a father to me and has been a wonderful companion to my mother.

They offered to take me out of boarding school as my mother stopped working for the airline but I was too scared of my father and my step-mother to object. So I stayed in boarding school and both my mother and I remained unhappy about it. I saw her only 4 days a month, as much as I saw my father and continued to take out my pain and suffering on her which made our relationship very difficult.

I always blamed her for our bad relationship but looking at it now - I realise it was probably more my fault than hers.

This is all I will write tonight.

Until tomorrow...

AA x