After putting off seeing Mum and being two weeks late for Mother’s Day, I finally went round there today. I thought she would be sulky, moody and questioning why I hadn’t been over, but she was none of those things; she was just pleased to see us. We stayed a couple of hours, and it was quite nice. I realised when I left that I don’t really see Mum as the woman she was when I was a child because she has changed a lot. She’s not my idea of perfect, but maybe she’s good enough.

I thought back on something I heard while we were away, which made me think at the time that every single one of us in the world is affected in some challenging way by our childhood and that maybe our challenge as adults is simply to make peace with that. I wasn’t sexually abused or beaten; I wasn’t abandoned or starved; I was loved to the extent that my parents could manage at that time in their lives. I realised too that Mum and Dad were both still stuck in their own childhoods. While I made the conscious decision to do things completely differently for my children, they didn’t have the ‘wisdom’ to do the same when they became parents.

I think back to my parents’ childhoods and what I know of them, and I know that my Dad’s perception of his childhood was one of not being loved. Dad felt neglected and unloved, and I wonder too if his control and abuse of women (that he still does now) was a misguided attempt to ensure that no woman got the better of him. His self-preservation was to become a strong man, strong enough that no one could hurt him. It’s worked.

Mum’s childhood was, upon reflection, probably quite similar to mine, in so far as the feeling of being different and being treated differently. Mum felt like a scapegoat and was seen as the strong, independent child. Mum hasn’t really ever spoken of happy times as a child.

I can recall many times Mum has spoken about being unsupported by Dad when they became parents. She was unable to turn to her own parents, and she probably felt really alone and depressed. Dad tells a different story. A story of being supportive and helpful, but knowing my dad as I do, I’ve no doubt his tale is embellished to make him look good or to make Mum look bad, which is something he often did when we were growing up. I imagine Mum must have felt very powerless as a wife and a mother.

I wonder if, when I was born, looking more like Mum than Abi did, she looked at me and subconsciously decided to re-enact her own childhood with me and make me the unloved child. I think probably at the point I was born, she’d have been mentally, physically and emotionally drained from her marriage and motherhood, especially as Dad was accusing her of sleeping with other men at this point; he even accused Mum of someone else fathering me.

Could it be possible that Mum couldn’t form a loving relationship with Abi because Dad had already started at that point to make Abi his golden child, therefore pushing Mum out (pretty much as Tom did with Annie and I), and she couldn’t form a loving relationship with me out of fear that if she showed more love to me than to Abi it would prove to Dad that there was a chance I wasn’t his?

I think by the time she had my younger sisters, she was older, wiser and braver, and she’d started to stand up to him, so she didn’t hold back with her love for Izzy and Susie, regardless of anything Dad might say.

For all the things Mum did or didn’t do to and for me as a child, Dad was just as bad, but his actions don’t seem to have consciously impacted me as harshly as Mum’s, possibly because it was Mum’s love that I craved, not Dad’s. If I’m being fair, Dad never showed me any love either; in fact, Mum was probably kinder to me, overall, than Dad was. I’ve chosen throughout my adult life to focus on all the good my Dad did for me, but I’ve never chosen to look at all the positives that Mum no doubt did too. I have focused for so long on the negatives around Mum, and yet one of my strongest beliefs in life is that everything is balanced. For every positive there is a negative and vice versa.

If I can sit for almost five hours and come up with a list a mile long of all the negatives around Mum, then surely, with an open and willing heart, I would be able to come up with the same in positives. Also, if I can see the positives in my relationship with Dad, then I should also be able to see the negatives, because they were there – there were a lot there – and for each time he balanced out Mum’s negativity, I have to start thinking that maybe she did the same for his negativity.

I left Mum’s with a greater willingness than ever before to really understand her and to start the forgiveness process, because really, all any of us are doing is living out our own previous undealt-with pain in our current relationships. I’ve been very lucky that I was born with a thirst for a deeper understanding of the self; maybe Mum wasn’t blessed with that, and so maybe it wasn’t even possible for her to do the work on herself and her pain that I have been able to do on myself. That alone is reason to forgive, because maybe all along, then and now, she was and is just doing the best she can do. That is all any of us can do.