Thursday, 7 August 2014

'My mother is dead - and it's the best news I've ever had': Read shocking story and you may just start to understand


Ding, dong, the witch is dead: Tabicta as a baby with her mother - a cold and hysterical woman - in the 1950s

So here I am, aged 59, and officially an orphan. My father died 12 years ago and I went to the funeral, grieved, missed him, did all the things you do when you lose a parent.
 
Now my mother has gone too, but hold your condolences. This time, it feels very different. I won’t be going to the funeral. I won’t send flowers. The only thing I want to do is dance, for I am glad.
 
I heard that she was dead last month. There were no tears. I went to bed feeling pure relief. I slept well. The next morning I logged onto Facebook and wrote: ‘Ding, Dong, the witch is dead.’
 
Incapable of love: Tabicta (pictured aged eight) doesn't have a single happy memory of her mother
 
I know this sounds callous, appalling. Maybe I should feel guilty about my lack of grief, but I don’t. All I feel is that the black cloud that has been overhead for all of my life is gone, and I can see the sun.
 
My mother didn’t love me. The truth is, she never cared if I was dead or alive. As a child I tried my best to impress her, make her proud of me, like me a little. But she was incapable.
 
She wasn’t warm. She never praised. Not once did she ever say: ‘I love you’. Instead, she found fault. She shouted. Mostly I remember her shouting.
 
Damaged: Tabicta's life has been shaped by her mother's cruel actions
 
From the outside it must have looked like we were an ordinary middle-class family. We weren’t rich, but we were comfortably off. At one point we had two homes — one in town, where my father was a college lecturer in maths and metallurgy; one in the country, where we lived out of term-time.
 
I was born in North Yorkshire, in July 1955, the third child of four. Although my father was a talented man, Mother never recognised this. In her eyes, he was never good enough.
 
 
 
 

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