Actually, I had a happy childhood.

This was sparked off in my head by this brilliant post by the wonderful Arwyn at Raising my Boychick, and the comments other people have left there. It got a bit more personal than I intended.

My mother died when I was 2 years old. If you ascribe to theories of maternal deprivation, from that point on I was doooomed. Unless I was already doomed because my mother went back to work when I was 6 weeks old. Or doomed even earlier than that, because she had been uncertain about having children some years before I was born. (Yes, some-one has suggested that this was likely to be the cause of my depression.) I've had at least 3 medical professionals who basically went 'Aha! That's why you're fucked up!' when I mentioned my mother's death. They've leapt on it as the Ultimate Cause of my mental illness.

All of which seems unfair on my poor old mum. I'm not going to deny that her illness and death probably had a serious effect on my emotional development, my character and my long-term mental health. But the exact same thing is true of the death of my grandmother when I was 7, and the bullying I experienced when I was 11. To pinpoint the cause of all my mental health problems to one event, almost 20 years ago, seems absurd.

And you know what, it's also sexist. It assumes that my mother was the most important person in my life at that point, which isn't true - my father was my primary carer. The response from many people seems to be based on the idea that there are particular kinds of love and care which can only be provided by a mother. That places a really large burden on women with children, and sets expectations which are incredibly hard to fulfil. It's not fair in fathers, other family members and the other adults in children's lives. Growing up, I had many people around me who I knew loved me and cared about me. I was never emotionally deprived or neglected. The assumption that the death of my mother inevitably led to a miserable childhood, and in turn to my adolescent and adult depression seems to discount those experiences.


I suppose it's the inevitability of that explanation that bothers me too. If childhood bereavement automatically leads to adult mental health problems, where does that leave me? I can't go back in time and save my mother from cancer. And considering that the cancer was probably present in her body before she got pregnant, that would most likely result in me not being born. Talking about her death upsets me in the short term, and I'm really not convinced it will do any good in the long term. To some extent, I feel I've said everything I have to say on the subject. Her death seems very disconnected from the reality of my life now.

The reactions from most people when they find out about my upbringing range from pity to curiousity. I'm not quite as tragic a figure as an orphan, but it's clearly too much to expect for me to be normal. My guess is that in a society where a range of family structures were common, motherlessness would not be seen as such a freakish and pathetic state. But I don't know if I'm going to far there - criticising people who are simply empathising, extrapolating from their own relationships with their mothers and their grief at their imagined (or real) death.

This has been a tricky post for me to write, as it's at the intersection of the politics I'm very passionate about, and my painful personal experiences. I feel almost like I'm being too defensive, too sensitive. My instinctive response to the idea that children need their mothers around them all the time is to shout 'My mother died and I'm fine!'. Except for much of my life I haven't been 'fine', by most definitions. It's a balance I'm still struggling to strike - acknowledging the impact of my mother's death, without downgrading the love and care and support I received from other people throughout my childhood.