Shaking hands with your daughter - gross!

In late 2010 I (Eve) made my first serious effort to re-establish contact with my Birth Father. It was never going to be easy and I don’t know, looking back, if was a sensible thing to have attempted.  After all the earlier meeting with my Birth Mother on her own hadn't gone particularly well!

Even after many years apart would you try to shake hands on meeting your own daughter – no I thought not. My Dad tried to though. My Mum had reminded me of me in some ways and Dad was clearly under her control. How he made the shed loads of money he clearly had made was a complete mystery and I could only think that he must be very different in the real world.

Throughout their married life when faced with a problem they just seem to have thrown money at it. Problems don’t seem to have an emotional component as far as they are concerned and when talking to me they really struggled to see the situation from my perspective. The sort of things they seemed to want to do was to “normalise the situation” (their exact words) is to include me in their Will and contribute to the cost of my house move. Nice practical things, no emotional component to confuse the issue.

Then I saw the two of them together. Mum has always claimed to all involved that she has been suffering from depression since she was a teenager and this was “the explanation, rather than the excuse” (her words again) for what happened in the past. I was not certain what Mum told me was entirely truthful. I was not even sure if she really knew or remembered the whole truth any more. Every now and again she would slip back into political mode (she was briefly a high-achiever in local politics) and she left me wondering if everything inside her head was entirely normal. I suspected not.

I ended up being quite happy to meet with them both from time to time and even to accept their money. They would need to accept that was unlikely that they will never be a major influence on me in the way that others were and I suspected (in 2010/2011) that this was going to be a problem moving forward.

 

And of course I was right! My Mother has never bonded with Alice (coming up 3) and she still seems to be in denial about historical facts. I tend to write to her rather than phone so there is always a record of what has been agreed - and if you think that is rather strange you would be right!