My mother was there, but she wasn't.

I'm the eldest of 6 children now aged 32, 30, 25, 23, 22 and 18.

The lovely Kate said, you say you brought up your siblings...where was your mum?

well

She was vacuuming and cleaning the house, top to bottom EVERY SINGLE DAY.

She left me in charge of the children in the house, alone from the age of 11 (children aged 9, 4 and 2). Sometimes for 10 minutes while she went to the corner shop, sometimes (in school hols) it could be a trip to the supermarket in town for an hour. I remember one day, standing at my bedroom windows while all hell was breaking loose behind me. Crying, asking 'mum, where are you?'.

she didn't drive, so she walked everywhere.

Sometimes she would come home and say she had been to the shops, insulting my intelligence when she had obviously had a sunbed or eyelash tint.

This wasn't every day, I won't exaggerate. But nonetheless it shouldn't have happened.

I taught my brothers and sisters to say please, because I was basically their toddler-slave. God I loved them so much. I still do. My hatred for our mother has meant that them living with her for so long into their adult lives has got in the way of us being friends (that and my stupid phone-issues-phobia).

My mum didn't have a job, she pretended to have a job once and had a couple of Saturday jobs. Yes, you read that right, she PRETENDED TO HAVE A JOB.

She also faked burglaries.

When she was around, in the house, she had a way of putting her anxieties onto me, 'where are the children? That's dangerous'.

This is pretty painful to write. I cannot hope to tell you all of the ways that she was emotionally absent from my life - emotional absence is very hard to accept as a child.

When I was 8, my parents had been divorced for over 2 years. My dad dropped me and my brother off at home after a lunch at Harry Ramsdens (the original one in West Yorks) and I got a lovely jewellery set from Father Christmas. My dad left, I got upset. I missed him so much. I said that was why I was sad. I was sent to my room, branded as naughty and shamed for feeling how any child should about a fun dad.

From that day, I suppose I stopped trusting her, I learned how to keep emotions secret, inside me because she didn't deserve to see them anymore. many other little things happened, but that was a turning point.

I told her about what my shool friends did, sleepovers in tents, pornos shown to them by odd parents of children they babysat, the boys they kissed. All of my stuff I saved inside, and I either prayed and told 'god' or talked to my teddy.

I decided to turn away from faith in my late 20s due to other things but praying was all I had. After all, lovely as my siblings were, you can't share your deepest secrets with them... toddlers don't care and teenage brothers...well, they just want ammunition(and rightly so!).

So those are a small sample of the most upsetting things I can remember. She failed me in so many ways. I have no idea how to reconcile them for myself, let alone learn to forgive it all.

Have you forgiven a parent for such misdeeds? Any help in forgiving would be appreciated.