What can I tell you of my father, your grandfather? It is too simple to say, “he was a bad man”. I know he did bad things, but I didn’t know him long enough, or well enough, to say that was constitutive of the person he was. It pains me, for your sake, to think that the badness was inherent as opposed to acted-out. What would that mean for you, the inheritance diluted at least by your own father’s blood? What would that mean for me?

You look so much like me – although your eyes are green and not blue. And they sparkle with life, with a joy just below the surface that is always about to break through. When I was a child, my eyes rarely met those of the people around me. In my first school photo, I look at the camera, but the smile is hesitant, my body curled slightly, protective, unwilling to open out. I was good at disappearing. Into books, into making and drawing. I could hide well.

Because of my Father, I suppose it was inevitable that I sought a love that was not second-hand. A love that was not unilateral. A love that didn’t feel like the acid burn in my throat after vomiting. And so, when I had the choice between independence or following my first love to university, I chose the latter. A foolish choice.

Before my stepfather gathered us in his embrace and rescued us from the bad things, my mother worked two, sometimes three jobs. A machinist in a textile factory, a server in a chip shop, a barmaid. All her money went into the small, terraced house she purchased with my father who spent the money he sporadically earned on drink and drugs. She signed it over to him when she finally escaped. He had held hostage his parental rights over me, a commodity he was willing to bargain with. It was a gross introduction to capitalism. Everything has a price.

I had wished for you for many years. I would talk to you before you were conceived, one hand on my lower belly, knowing the egg that would form you had been with me since birth. But before you there was another. Lost early, no more than a chemical line and a tidal wave of hope which crashed with the words “it’s not growing”. A scream which took hours to surface.

When my stepfather first became ill, we thought we would not have long together. They told us six months. That was ten years before he died. In that time the man I knew faded. It must have been a slow process, but it did not feel like it. Every stage of his decline had a new terror, a terror he dealt with first, often with anger and repulsion at the devices he and my mother collected to assist him. He rejected the loss of his independence and dignity, even at the expense of her exhaustion and the injuries she received trying to act as his legs, his arms, his back.