I hope nobody minds me posting this here. I felt the need to write this letter to my Dad's ex partner, who he was with for about 5 or 6 years after the death of my Mum when I was 9. Dad has sadly now also died and it is only recently as I've started to think about becoming a parent myself that I've really come to terms with the things that happened during my adolescence. Of course she (ex p) will never read this but it feels good to put it in a public space for some reason.
Here is a letter I have needed to write for a long time.
I used to hate you with an energy so strong that it burned away some of the goodness inside me. It has taken me years to get that back. I plotted the ways that terrible things could happen to you and I honestly wished you dead. I?ve never wished that about anyone else.
I know now you tried to help us after Mum?s death. When I was about twelve you bought me sanitary towels and a pretty wash bag to keep them in and I think I was too embarrassed to be grateful. Once we were looking through holiday photos and you said how pretty I looked in one of the pictures which was not the kind of thing that anybody said to me in those days, but you had already brought up teenage girls and you probably knew that I needed to hear things like that.
I know now that, in the years when you were cruel, in the years when you swore at me and my brother and called us useless brats and called me a slut and tormented our house with your vitriol, you were mentally ill. And I know now that the reason Dad put up with it all was not because he didn?t love us and care about us but because he, too, had been there; he had been hospitalised with depression after Mum?s death and he had got better and he held onto this crazed hope that you would get better, too.
I don?t know if you ever did. I don?t even know if you?re still alive. What I do know is that it wasn?t easy for you, it wasn?t easy for Dad, it wasn?t easy for my brother and it wasn?t easy for me, living after Mum?s death. We lived parallel lives when we should have been connected. We grieved alone when we should have grieved together. None of that was your fault. So, I?m writing to say, I?m sorry for everything that happened, and I forgive you for those parts of it that you were responsible for.
Thanks for listening.