Getting Old 🤣

What were your parents doing at your age?

Seriously, they were living in South London having moved back from the coast. They were always a dichotomy, dad needed the sea, and freedom, mum wanted to be near family. She’d won the battle.

They never had a let up of pressure, my dad’s health had started to fail before Nan died. She lived with them from when I was six until she had to go into a nursing home, so the only time they ever had alone, without responsibility, was the nine months between their wedding and my birth. I like to think I wasn’t too much of a problem though.

The first six years of my life were filled with happiness, or so I recall, but I don’t want to change that recollection for anything. I was the lucky one.

My grandfather became ill when I was 4 and died when I was six. That’s when the wheels came off for the family, especially them. It never let up.

I won’t go into it, it was messy, horrible, emotional, filled with betrayal and struggles that were nothing to do with them, and they didn’t deserve it. We had an element to our family that was toxic, it tore the family apart.

It was still going on at the age I am now. Dad was deteriorating, I lived a long way away, my brother worked full time and had a family but did what he could, and mum’s sister who lived within spitting distance of their house didn’t lift a finger.

We visited whenever we could, but I was at university as I was trying to find a way to earn more and help Tony, I couldn’t skip classes.

The similarities between my parents’ life and mine is annoying, I mean uncanny, I mean both.

Like them I have great friends, long-time friends. Apart from that we have to get on with it, but, we lack the complications they had and I’m extremely grateful for that.

I have way more support than they did.

I’d far rather have seen them like the image above. They had that. They were soul mates. But they never got to live that.

Although perhaps, just perhaps, there were times between it all that I didn’t know about, when they were able to be that way. I like to think so. Even when dad was ill and couldn’t speak properly, he could always say “cuddles time!” So I think they did. That’s nice.

Bless them.

And you.

Deb xx