When I was about 9 or 10 my aunt left her husband and 2 children and went to live with another man. As families we had been very close, spending most weekends together; as cousins we were close in age. For a short time, no one in the family knew where my aunt was, but gradually she re-emerged, and my mum and my grandmother kept in touch with her. Her own mother took the side of her husband, in that she barely ever spoke to her again. Things were however, not as they seemed, they so rarely are. Her husband had been a difficult man who had subjected her to verbal abuse and who had clear ideas on what a wife should be and what she should do. My aunt wanted to leave and take her children, but in 1970 (or there abouts) things were different than they are today, so she had gone and thought naively that she could come back for them later. My cousins were not allowed, by their father, to see their mother for several years, cards and presents were returned unopened or just thrown in the bin. Later, when my cousins had grown up it emerged that their father had really wanted to keep them with him because he could and because it would hurt my aunt and both left him and went to live with my aunt.

This post is not about the rights and wrongs of adultery, but about motherhood. To me it has been the most important job I have ever had to do, it has been the main priority bar none of the last 16 years and it has shaped the person I am and the things I do. I have always wondered how exactly things were so bad that my aunt had to go, and have never really understood how she could do it. I have had some pretty sticky moments in my own marriage, particularly when my son was 3 or 4 years old, but I have never considered leaving him and now would I have. I would go as far as to say that it is quite likely that he is one of the reasons our marriage has lasted so long and why I have stayed here.

Yesterday on my travels between meetings, the library and work, I listened to a phone in show about mothers who leave their children. It was probably one of the most powerful things I have listened to. People in their 30’s, 40’s and even a lady of 60 rang in to recount their experiences of their mothers leaving them and of the profound effect it has had on them throughout their lives. Some have struggled with their own relationships, have felt they have something to prove to their own children and all spoke of an irreparable relationship with their mothers into middle age.  A grand father rang and spoke movingly of how his own daughter left her children with an alcoholic and drug abusing partner, and how they themselves were now going through the courts in order to give the children a happy family home. These young children were already showing signs of being profoundly damaged by the rejection and its aftermath.

The most worrying part of all of this seems to me that some people do not view their children as the precious gift that they are, but as some kind of possession to be fought over like a CD collection or the family pet. It certainly made me think!

The above picture is the Celtic Knot of Motherhood.