My mother used to tell me she was being punished by God for leaving my father, so she couldn’t leave her current husband, for fear of more punishment. She used to say, ‘He won’t live long though because he puts so much salt and butter on his food, and he already has deadly high blood pressure. He’ll die and ill be freed from this.’

Over 30 years later and he’s still alive. Just a little bit of funny to add to your day. Totally aside from the humour I see in that, I felt like a spectator watching a horrific crime and doing nothing about it, when I was young listening to the hours of her speaking like this. I felt so guilty and churned up, but those hours were the only hours I felt like I meant something to her, guilty evil hours where my mother was focused on someone else.

I turned myself inside out trying to tick all her boxes so she’d love me, or even approve of me, or at the very least not yell and degrade me. I made mistakes in my life obeying her instructions on what I was failing in; mistakes that so far I’ve failed to fix. But not many people believe who she is because she’s very different with others who don’t fall into the inner most later if the onion.