My daughter has accused me of being too self-sacrificing, she said I always put everyone else’s needs before my own and that in the end it makes me tired and resentful because I never get what I want, and sometimes I look at her and wonder, Where on Earth did you come from, my precocious child?, because her insight can be profound, but often I don’t want to find it from my own daughter because I saw a therapist for long enough, thanks, but then I hear myself offering to drop something off for someone at Church or give them a lift when it’s going to make me half an hour late for an appointment, and I used to hate my mum for always being late, as if she had the right to make people wait for her, so that I never heard the school bell ring at the start of the day and the number of detentions I had because she was out of it on the couch, and when I was really little she was always smashing glasses and banging doors and I wanted to be on hand so she didn’t hurt herself, so I’d be waiting in the wings with a dustpan and broom carefully cleaning up the shards, while she ranted and accused me of being a spoilt brat until she fell asleep in front of the TV again, and she got so fat around the middle that I couldn’t help push her to bed any more, and she was always mad at me because we didn’t have any money so I did the paper round when I was seven, and I used to love being out on my bike in the early morning light skidding on the dew, because it was one less hour in the day I had to spend near her.
But then sometimes when I got home after school she had carefully cleaned away the rot of the night before and was in the kitchen chopping vegies and talking about what goodies she had found at the markets for tea, pretending that she liked cooking and was a good mother, and we were safe as houses if there was no cask in the fridge, but otherwise I’d lock myself in my bedroom with tapes of Wham on loud and wait for the sounds of destruction into the night, and I’m both sad and not that Layla never got to know old Violet, you know, I always thought her name had an ‘n’ missing, but she was too much to deal with for a little girl, and I hope that she has found some peace wherever she is, as long as she’s a long way away from me.