I never grew up in a Christian home. We never went to church never spoke about God, Jesus or anything to do with religion. We were brought up with right and wrong and good and bad, we had a choice about going to religious education (RE) our patents told us that it was up to us if we wanted to go or not. There were three of us plus our parents. I was born in 1976 and i am the oldest. Even my aunts, unckel's and cusisions wernt religious people. As they would say the only time that any of the family went to church was if it was for a wedding, funeral,or a christening. Christmas was all about presents and the man in the red suit, i remember it was a time for the adults to drink alcohol and kids playing, learnt at school that it was when Christ was born, Easter was all about how much chocolate you got from the Easter bunny.
Grew up in a small country town where every body new everybody and you were safe to walk up the street at the age of 7.
I was always trying to belong to something if it wasn't some sporting team i played hockey, basketball, and did pony club, was trying to belong to a group of something i tried nerds not that i was a brainy kid i couldn't read properly or write properly or spell so i was classed as a dumb kid got bullied so i got a bad attitude and joined the bad group at school started smoking, swearing, rebellious attitude, i was easily lead along. Back in the eighties when i was at high school i got bullied so badly that i would wag school, skip classes, then i started fighting, i would get sent to the office for bad mouthing to a teacher i knew the school rules of by heart cause i had to right them out so much the ladies in the office knew me by name so i was dealing with all this at school and then at home was not easy i coped some good floggings when i was younger (bad attitude towards everybody). im not froud of it now when i look back on it but is was the only way i knew how to deal with it all.
I never had a close relationship with my dad i was more closer to my mum but as i have grown up things have changed. i left home when i was 16 and went and worked out on stations (in the USA you call them ranches) i was a jilaroo that is when i learnt to work hard long days got up at 4am finished work at 8pm. The station was 30km to a Pub/hotel so after work we would drive to the pub drink alcohol till 2-3am then head home to get maybe an hour or two of sleep then start the day all over again sometimes the boss told us we had to stay in cause we had 2000/3000 head of cattle to put through the cattle yards. Grew up real fast out there lost my bad attitude meet a boy and fell in love and i thought to my self is this what i have been looking for all this time the love of a man. When i was 18 i told him that i needed a break and that i needed to find myself could not quite understand what i was talking about at the time, i just knew that something was missing in my life.
I always had this sense about when something was really wrong when not to do something, it was like an invisible wall to stop me (i know what it was now that kept me safe) i went back to the man i fell in love with and got engaged never married we tried to start a family and after 2 years of trying and nothing happened went to doctors and found out that i had PCOS(poly-cystic ovarian syndrome) i was told that i was infertile that i was lucky to produce an egg once a year, it was had to deal with at the time, we never gave up went on fertility drugs and then we just stoped trying.
i was sitting under a tree by my self one day and i hear this voice in my head i remember to this day what it said, You will have a baby but you will end up raising it by your self, i brushed it off and thought yeah right, then in 1998 i fell pregnant when i told my partner he never spoke to me for three days.
stay tuned for the next installment being pregnate and becoming a mum.
Fiona, you have had a raw deal.. And yet, if I told you my story growing up, you would tell me the same..
ReplyDeleteLife can be very heard and mainly it is that way because we make wrong choices. I was bullied at school also. I grew up without my father, just my mum. I found my father again when I was eighteen, but he never wanted to be a father figure. More like a friend.. The good thing is, you have the chance to teach talk to and direct Rose in the way you never were!! This is a priveledge you probably won't understand at this stage, but when you get to my age you will. The best years of my life was being a mum. I stayed home many times when I would have liked to go out. But in the end, I was a mum. One who cared! and so are you, xxx