Category: friends & family

When he & my mum split up, my father wrote this wonderful poem to help me (and us all) cope with such a hard thing. That’s where I learned that love can be very very big and that even when things don’t work, even when it all hurts, no one has to be the bad guy.

Thanks, dad. It always has meant so much to me.

(This is another thing that was pinned up in our hallway of art & ideas to remind and inspire for the entire time I lived in that house and after).

[Although, with a bit more time and perspective, in 2018 I realize that setting the expectation a six-year-old would handle the whole situation with calm maturity was rather a heavy load to lay on a kid. It created a mix of useful skills—not getting worked up or rocking the boat when it wasn’t going to change anything, being able to keep authority figures happy, along with the lessons mentioned above—and the foundation for some things that had less positive impacts later, when my acting above my age had become so good that sometimes the adults around forgot the maturity with which I expressed myself didn’t reflect actual experience. That tendency to align myself toward the adults leaves me suspecting I missed out on some great bonding with my peers, especially in my teen years.]