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Thursday 7 August 2014

'My mother is dead - and it's the best news I've ever had': It's a confession that goes against nature. But read Tabitca's shocking story and you may just start to understand

mother
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.’

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

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.

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.
Incapable of love: Tabicta (pictured aged eight) doesn't have a single happy memory of her mother
Incapable of love: Tabicta (pictured aged eight) doesn't have a single happy memory of her mother
She’d come from a large family herself. She was the youngest and was quite cossetted, I think. Her mother died when she was 16, and she married my father at 18, just before the end of the war in 1944. Maybe she was too young. She was immature. She was still immature when she was in her eighties. In some ways, she never grew up.
They met in wartime when people went away not knowing if they were going to come home. My father had been in the RAF. Their marriage wasn’t happy. I don’t actually have a single memory of my mother being happy.
Hysterical, yes. She was always dramatic, always shouting, always making a scene. We — my siblings, my father — walked on eggshells around her. He was a good man, a kind man, but he was weak. He didn’t stand up to her. If he’d been different, stepped in to say: ‘This is wrong’, things might have been different, but he didn’t.
Everything about her was cold. She would sign birthday cards: ‘From Mother’. Not ‘love from Mother’. There would never be a kiss on them. She never kissed me. I only remember one hug in my whole life. I was in my forties.
She was going into hospital for an operation and I think she was scared. Even that hug was about her, not me. When I was little, I’d bring her presents, home-made cards. She’d put them in the bin straight away. She didn’t like home-made. Or maybe she didn’t like me.
She certainly seemed incapable of love for anyone or anything.
When we were growing up, if she got fed up with a pet she would take it to the vet and have it put to sleep. If she could have done the same with children, I doubt I would be here writing this.
She always said she was ill, but there never seemed to be anything wrong with her. She was a woman who thought that the world owed her a living. It’s not as if she worked at home, either. The house was never tidy or clean. She hated housework, and always wanted my sister and me to do the chores (although never our brothers). She was a terrible cook.
She didn’t have friends. She didn’t really have hobbies. The only thing that seemed to get her animated was shopping for clothes. When she and my father went out, she had to be the best-dressed. If she wasn’t, she would come home in a rage.
Damaged: Tabicta's life has been shaped by her mother's cruel actions
Damaged: Tabicta's life has been shaped by her mother's cruel actions
These rages wouldn’t be kept private, either. I stopped bringing friends home because whenever I did there would be a scene.
Someone once asked me if my mother was an alcoholic. I said yes. It was completely untrue — she never drank — but I thought it would be more acceptable than the truth. She just wanted to be the centre of attention.
As a child, I hoped I had been adopted and dreamed that one day my real mother would knock on the door. By my early teens I was going to nightclubs, as an escape I suppose. I would run away and went all the way to London once. When I came home, she had completely cleared my room. I opened the door and there was nothing there.
She put all the stuff back — to this day I don’t know if it had been a punishment, or if she had just been trying to erase me — but it hurt. Not once did she say: ‘I was worried about you.’
It was only when I had my own daughter, 30 years ago, that I realised how dysfunctional my home life had been. The penny dropped when Mother came to visit me in the first weeks of motherhood.
She held my daughter, not cuddled her — that was never my mother’s way. But when the baby cried and I rushed to comfort her, Mother told me I was doing it all wrong. ‘Let her cry,’ she said. ‘Push the pram to the bottom of the garden, so you can’t hear her. Put yourself first.’ Suddenly, the whole of my childhood made sense. My mother had put herself first always. She did it until the day she died.
My mother shaped my life, I know. I am damaged because of her.
I moved homes, jobs, all my life. I was unable to settle. I am not in touch with any of my siblings; three of them were not in touch with my mother when she died at home in Middlesbrough following a short illness. I don’t know if any of them went to the funeral. I don’t even know where it was. This is what she taught us about family life.
I did get married, in 1977. She came to the wedding, but she wasn’t a typical mother-of-the-bride. She didn’t say: ‘You look nice,’ or: ‘I am proud of you.’ She didn’t like my husband John, who ran his own classic-car restoration business.
He died in a boating accident four years after we married and I have never had a settled relationship since. I tend to keep people at a distance. The biggest thing she taught me was self-reliance, which is both a blessing and a curse.
I have tried to understand my mother. Sometimes I wonder if she was jealous. She had everything — a family, a lovely home, yet she was not satisfied. She took no pleasure in my success. When I got a place at university she said: ‘Why can’t you get a proper job?’ When I was 30, I enrolled in a psychology degree at Durham University, going on to lecture there. It was partly an attempt to make sense of my childhood.
The professional in me understands that my mother needed help. She clearly had a personality disorder. Maybe therapy would have helped, but she would never have agreed to it.
My father bailed out in the end. He upped and left one day in the 1980s — when we had all left home. He had come to hate her, and couldn’t face a retirement with her. But I didn’t actually give up on my mother until about four years ago.
Poison: When Tabicta had her own daughter Julia (pictured as a baby), her mother told Julia that Tabicta didn't love her and was a bad mother because she was always working
Poison: When Tabicta had her own daughter Julia (pictured as a baby), her mother told Julia that Tabicta didn't love her and was a bad mother because she was always working

I kept plugging away, taking my daughter on duty visits. Yet she poured her poison on my daughter too, for which I could not forgive her. She once told her that I didn’t love her, that I was a bad mother because I was always working.
My daughter knew this wasn’t true, but it hurt. Why did she have to destroy everything?
Then, in 2010, I started to get ill. At first I thought it was just flu, but I was soon coughing up blood, and they discovered I had bronchiectasis, a serious lung condition.
I moved to Scotland, to the country, for a better quality of life. I did not tell my mother where I was going, which some people would say is unforgivable, but by then, I’d had enough. I admitted defeat.
The last contact we had wasn’t even direct contact. My daughter, Julia, who tried to keep a relationship going with her grandma, called her to tell her I had been diagnosed with a lung disease and that the prognosis was not great.
Free at last: 'Will I miss her? No, I will not. For her death has set me free. At last' says Tabicta
Free at last: 'Will I miss her? No, I will not. For her death has set me free. At last' says Tabicta
My mother was told I maybe only had a few years to live. Her reaction? ‘Well, I am not well myself, and I have to pay someone to look after me.’ Typical Mother. Everything was always about her.
And now she is finally gone. Julia called me to break the news gently. She wasn’t sure how I’d react, and neither was I. But in the end I felt this immediate elation, as if a great weight had been lifted.
My greatest fear was always that I would turn into my mother. We laugh about opening our mouths and hearing our mother’s voices come out, but for me it was a terror.
Yet now she is gone, I can relax because I know that I am not her. I love my daughter more than life itself. From the moment I held her I thought: ‘I am going to protect you for the rest of your life.’
When she graduated I was the proudest mum in the world. The biggest compliment she ever paid me was when she told someone how we never had much money when she was growing up, ‘but our house was full of love’. That made me cry.
I am ill now, and I do not know how long I have left. My daughter feels it too, but she goes out of her way to show me that she is there for me.
It was my birthday the other day and she set off at 6am to drive all the way from Wales to see me. I am so grateful for that.
The thought of leaving her is devastating, but when I do go, I hope she will feel all the things that I am not feeling at the moment. I hope she will mourn me, and miss me, but be thankful for the times we shared.
As for my mother, I do not wish her ill. I hope that if there is an afterlife she is happy in it, in a way that she never was in this life. But will I miss her? No, I will not. For her death has set me free. At last.
Interview by Jenny Johnston
  • Tabitca Cope is the author of Dark Ness and Dark Wear. The third book in the trilogy, Dark Esk, will be published later this year. Tabitca is a pseudonym.


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