Another day, another critisism from The Mother about how little I do to help. And fuck it, I wish it didn't have the power to hurt as much as it does still. How much I realise I just pathetically want her to like me, to like her.
I tried to write a letter to her one friend today, because I can no longer have the strength to deal with it. It turned into a rant.

Dear J.

I don’t know if I’ll have the courage to send this. I know I’m not brave enough to talk or speak about this. I feel like some pathetic 14 year old brat rather than a grown woman who will be 30 this year. But I need to speak to someone and I don’t know who else would do.

My mother needs help. Do not worry, it is not financial or physical or anything like that, but I am genuinely concerned and I no longer have the strength to deal with this myself.

It is so difficult to know where to begin, I feel like it’s been happening forever and I think it has. I have spent my whole life trying to help and please her and I haven’t.

It is very difficult to grow up when you have a brother like Brat, my mother likes to talk – I’m sure you’ve heard – of how everyone in Kidbrooke Park knew him, and I passed silently under the radar, how I would be summoned away when doctors and specialists came, how he was made to feel extra special when he went to Greenacres. And it is especially hard when you’re still of school age and you hear your mother talk about how if she had had him first she would never had, had a second. Now I am old enough to realise how she means that his problems took up so much of her time, how she had to fight for him, but then when I was a child I believed it meant she didn’t care much for me.

Always, always Brat. My grandparents. My dad’s family, they would bring him presents all the time. I remember, in the flat we lived in a long time ago, in our old house and always being told that “Oh they’ll bring you something next week” and then I don’t remember if I was told to stop asking or I learnt that it was pointless to ask.

Always, always Brat,. Always made to feel second best to him. I could list many examples from growing up and I do genuinely believe she doesn’t realise how she made me feel.

Going on to secondary school, I was bullied too. I just never made a fuss about it as Brat did. I accepted the kicks, the stealing of my possessions, the endless, relentless name calling and mental torture. I could deal with it, It was my fault for being different. I knew that, for loving animals, for not having friends, for not knowing how to interact with people. Socially awkward. But Brat was fragile. IS fragile. He needs looking after, must be defended.

The one day, not long after we moved here. The one time I ever tried to explain how miserable I was. I was helping to paint my room. My Dad was preparing to go out. It was a Saturday during the summer. The first of my a-levels. I was wearing a blue tshirt and jeans. Stupid the way it is fixed on my memory.

“Oh, stop complaining. Your life is worthless anyway.”

Do you believe my mother said anything like that? Do you think perhaps I mis-interpreted something?

I wrote it in my diary once the tears had stopped. So hard to hear something like that from my own Mum.

I have tried so hard to please her, to please my dad, and it is so confusing for me. Sometimes to try and befriend her I would go with her to your house. To Sharon’s house. To try and talk to her, to understand more about what made her tick. And I would go because I had no friends except my books.

I know they are proud that I went to uni. At least I think they are. I remember sitting in our car outside my Grandparent’s house and my mother trying to talk me out of going to university.

I was desperate to go. I was so miserable. I don’t think anyone knows how miserable I was, how difficult I found it to get up in the mornings, how I dreaded going to school but yet I dreaded weekends. How I couldn’t sleep, how I couldn’t concentrate. How the teachers in my 6^th form mocked me openly, to get cheap giggles from the rest of the class, to appear “cool”. The classes I skipped when I simply couldn’t bear it any more.

And then at home. I was doing the washing and cleaning for everyone, I hoovered, I cleaned the bath, I folded socks and cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen. And it hurts as I do this all today, for her. And he does nothing. He leaves his plates lying about and I am told it is my responsibility to tidy after him.

I am expected to clean and cook for him when she is not there and if I do not do as he says, how he will lash out at me, hitting, punching, kicking and screaming.

All this when I was 16/17. All this going back years. Always, looking after Brat, because it is not fair that he is not like normal people. That he needs help.

Irrelevant.

Dad was getting sick as we know. I would face all this and then walk home. Slowly. Always slowly and I would wonder what I would do if he was not up when I got home. Who I would call first. Mother? An ambulance? You? His parents?

Sometimes I would creep into his room and watch to see if he was still breathing.

Perhaps it’s not unsurprising that I failed my a-levels. I could, should have worked harder, but I am weak. I crumbled under it all, I tried to look after him, I tried to look after her, I tried to look after Brat, I had his paper round to do while he was at school and wanted to save for a Playstation and I let my own studies suffer.

 So she tried to talk me out of going, perhaps reasonably after my a-level results. But I was determined to go! To make a life for myself, to be able to go out without someone asking where I was going, who I was going with. To be normal and make friends.

And I went, and I was so happy. I made friends! I went out! And yet I was not free, called every morning, afternoon and evening. The panic when I accidently unplugged my phone, the way the housekeeper came to find me laughing with it all, saying they were coming to Derby. To look in hospitals after 24 hrs with no contact, how they had called the police. 18 years old, living 100+ miles away and yet still as if I was at home and had gone out without telling them.

So confusing. On one hand she smothers me, even now. Needing to know what I am doing at al hours. Who I am with. When I will be going home. On the other hand sarky comments about how useless I am. If I was failing my classes. And the comments that still hurt nowadays.

Counting down the days until I could go back to Derby and be me again.

I was offered a job you know, when I went back that last time. After we found out about Dad. And I knew I could not take it.

So I went home and I helped look after Dad, I helped look after Brat, I helped look after the house  and I helped look after Mum. Or at least I thought I was. Instead there was more guilt. Guilt that I wasn’t doing enough, guilt that she lashed out at me because she was angry and frightened and I have always been there when she needs someone to be cross with. I would fold the clothes wrong, I would forget to hoover or wipe the sides down. I would go out occasionally and she could not go out. And she would shout and tell me how useless I was and I would silently agree.

How many times I cried? How many times in that year did I silently promise to be a better daughter, to help more. I left my friends, the boy I was seeing, the chance – the only real chance I’ve had of doing a job I’d love, to help out, to be there for everyone and instead I was hindering, messing that up as well.

I did the things Brat should have done, but Brat needed looking after too. He couldn’t/wouldn’t sit with Dad, wouldn’t take him out in the wheelchair. I wasn’t physically strong enough! The times I nearly knocked him out off it! I would ask and he would grunt and go out.

His rage grew, to the moody and sullen person he is today. He is someone else who needs help.

I fretted in those nights about what would happen when he died, how on Earth I could look after everyone, the way Dad asked me too.

And when it did, it was me who sat with Mother and Dad’s body. It was me who helped organise the funeral, it was me who did the calling when Mother felt unable.

And at the funeral. I always find it strange looking back, how surreal it was, The boy in tears, Mother needed me but I didn’t know what to say, so I linked arms with her.

I looked after her. She says we both did, but he never. He never discussed anything with her, never sat with her. It was me, me and my stupid need to be liked by her.

And then she went into hospital and it was me who re-arranged shifts to see her, me who struggled down to Sainsbury’s on the bus and back again to do the shopping (the one time he took me in the car, he threw a strop and left me to pay for 50 pounds worth of shopping alone and take it home).

I have always put her first, I have turned down nights out for her, Welshy – bless him, realises that I need to make her happy, before I make him happy, that I had to hide him from her for a year, how when I told her about him, she refused to have anything to do with him. To meet him. All the snide comments and awful things, about how I’d rather have sex than go out to Lakeside with her, how I’d rather spend time with him than her, how she feels unwanted now I have him, but I need him. He makes me feel normal, he does not put judgement or make me feel guilt like she does.

 I have done things that I really do not want to do for her. I still cook, and clean and tidy for her. And he does nothing. And this is what really hurts J. Because I hear her. I hear her talking to you, to Debbie, to B and B about how wonderful Brat is, how much he is looking after her. Or alternatively how we do nothing to help. And I wish it didn’t hurt but it does. I still run around taking her to places, inviting her out, spending my money on things that she’d like, that I have no interest in, going on holiday with her, because she makes/made me feel guilt that she has no one to take out.

And I still cry, because I cannot make her happy. She comments on Facebook about how she is having meals for one because I have gone out, she tells me that if I moved out she cannot afford to live here, that she’d have to sell Dad’s house, that she’d need to take a second job, get a lodger in.

So much guilt for wanting to be normal. I am the only one of my friends who is still living at home at the age of 29. I have guilt because I want to go away and never, ever speak to her again. Guilt because I cannot do that. Because she has no one else. Because she needs me to be cross about, to scream and shout at. To tell me I’m useless, to throw my clothes into the garden because I’ve failed to fold up her clothes as she particularly wants them.

And The Boy. The boy does not pay as much rent as I do, as he has a car to run, despite earning more than I do. I gave her money for the leccy bill and he never as he had to buy a new bike for some reason.

But yet, he is the one she talks about on Facebook, how he gave her some money to get a new boiler, I gave her over a thousand pounds for that and the only reason I couldn’t give more, was because it was locked in an ISA. And why should I have to justify it?

It is always Brat she talks about, how he looked after her. How he still looks after her. He can barely sit in the same room as her, he does not eat with his knife and fork, if he lowers himself to eat with us. He has the manners of a pig, but it is acceptable and it is because he is Brat and this should not turn into a rant against him. I want to portray things at home fairly. It is not his fault, he is not like normal people and he needs to be looked after, it is not his fault that he is always angry because he cannot get a job he would like, and because he too, is still not recovered from Dad. I need, must, remember this and be tolerant. But it is OH, oh so hard when he hurts me, and when he rather childishly covered all the plates, and bowls and kitchen surfaces in tomato ketchup last summer because I did not clean up his dinner plate from the night before. That was my fault and I will try to be a better sister and not anger him.

I realised a long time ago that my Mother is ill. She needs help, she needs counselling in some way, I am oh so tired of trying to make her happy, and so tired of the guilt when I fail (as recently as New Year’s Day when I chose to go to football instead of sit at home, in silence with her).

And I wish it didn’t hurt so much when she tells people how useless I am, how in her moments of judgement she deems me as bad as Brat, how I do nothing to help about the house. I could, I should do more and perhaps you will read this and agree with her, and this is why I may never send this, because I am too afraid you will say it is the ramblings of a spoilt brat – as she often accuses me – that I need to be more tolerant and patient with her, that she has been through a lot.

But surely I am right to be angry when she goes through the possessions in my room, how she helps herself to my clothes, how she’ll even sleep in my room during the day. Again she does not realise that I am 30 and surely entitled to a little bit of space? I get cross how she talks to me as if I was one of her children at nursery, I – as awful as it is – couldn’t care less about who has been awful to her, what kid did what. But I smile and feign interest and then watch some godawful TV with her, just so she is not alone. Because she has been through a lot and needs looking after.

I have been through a lot too J.

I feel better for having written this, perhaps I needed to get it out of my system and realise it is me and that I need to be a better human, to be more tolerant but I genuinely think she is ill and she needs help of some sort.