28 Years of ME…

Twenty-eight years ago today I entered the world. My mum was in her early 20′s and my dad was in his early 30′s. They didn’t get married until after I was born therefore making me a bastard child.

For the first four years of my life we moved from Warwickshire to Sussex to Yorkshire which is where we were living when my sister arrived.

As you can see from this photo, I didn’t adapt to her arrival very well. I hated the fact that I had to go to bed while she got to stay up with ‘my parents’ and I can still remember jumping up and down on my bed and screaming when I was supposed to be asleep. It wasn’t all bad though and although we literally hated each other for about eighteen years, we did have some good times.

Life for the next six years involved lots more moving. We rarely stayed in one place for longer than a year and in that year we used to live in more than one house, usually followed by a long-term stay in various holiday cottages. It’s hard to say why we moved so much. Part of it was due to my Dad’s job, he designed Formula One racing cars and at the peak of his career was earning about eighty grand a year which back then was mega-bucks, this obviously enabled us to move quite easily, but I think the driving factor was my Mum’s inability to live in one house for longer than six months. I think she felt like if she moved then she would be able to escape the problems in her life but clearly it didn’t work.

By the age of ten we were living in Buckinghamshire, which is where my brother joined us. My mum suffered with terrible post-natal depression after his birth so I played a big part in looking after him but by this age I was more than happy to do so and loved being his mini-mum.

The next few years involved various house and school moves before one day my mum decided to pack all our stuff up and drive us all up to Scotland, minus my Dad who I don’t think had any idea where we were going. He used to work away in America a lot and I think by this stage their relationship had started to fall apart.

We spent about a month in Scotland before my mum decided that we needed to move to was Glastonbury. I hated the place. I was twelve by this point, had been to a different school every single year since the age of four and had spent the last four weeks travelling around Scotland. Since turning up in Glastonbury we lived in a healing centre, three holiday cottages and nine houses, plus there was a brief move to West Sussex to start another school only to be pulled out and moved back again four months later.

It’s safe to say that my education was well and truly screwed by this point, so by the age of 13 I started to rebel. I started smoking and drinking, followed by drug-taking and skiving off school. I started off in the top sets of my classes but by year 10 I had stopped going to school altogether so it was decided that I should only take four GCSEs. I was in a relationship that took over every part of my brain, I was infatuated with him, I had no self-confidence and didn’t think I deserved better than someone who used to go out and have sex with other people every weekend.

This photo was taken ten years ago today….

It was my 18th birthday and the year to follow was one of the worst years of my life, I won’t go into it here as it is fairly depressing but I have written about it on my other blog – Without You, I Have Nothing.

By the age of 19 however, things were looking up and I had just got together with Dad2BabyInsomniac. It’s so funny to look back to the start of our relationship, we were so young. We have been through such a lot together and as I told him the other day, he has honestly restored my faith in men. Had I got with someone else who thought that it was okay to lie and cheat their way through a relationship then I probably would have just assumed that all men were bastards, but he proved to me that they’re not.

Since we got together we have lived with his mum, my mum, moved to Spain, spent a year in Bristol and even split up for a couple of months but in 2010 something happened that changed out lives forever.

I found out I was pregnant and for me, it was the moment that my life really started to have a proper purpose.

Iyla has changed both of our lives in the most amazing way ever, and a way that I don’t think either of us were prepared for. Dad2BabyInsomniac thought he wasn’t ready to become a dad, he thought he would miss out on things he wanted to do but your priorities change once you meet the little bundle that you have created and nothing else is as important and them. He is such an amazing dad and being part of this little family gives me more happiness than anything else in the world (most of the time anyway!).

This birthday is probably going to be one of the most boring days ever. My car has broken down, Dad2BabyInsomniac has a broken leg and it’s going to rain all day but it really doesn’t matter because when I look back over my life, this is the most content and happy that I have ever been, although I’m not going to tell Dad2BabyInsomniac that as he might change his mind about coming to Iyla’s playgroup this morning!