I have spent the past 15 years longing for a reunion with my mother. Two months ago, I finally got what I’d been dreaming of – only not quite as expected.
I’ve been estranged from my parents since 2011, with virtually no contact – not even a birthday or Christmas card – for more than a decade.
Our rift was the result of a lifetime of volatile relationships and bitter disappointments. My father’s emotional and physical abuse and my mother’s constant siding with him – of which much more below – in the end ruined our relationship beyond repair.
But all of this is not to say that I didn’t, somewhere in the back of my mind, crave a happy ending to the sad story of my family.
When I read about famous estrangements, such as Brooklyn’s from the Beckhams and Prince Harry from his father, I know there is probably much more going on behind closed doors than we can ever know.
When I see people suggesting on forums that one or other party should back down – that David and Victoria should never have allowed it to get this far, that King Charles should extend an olive branch – I know none of those people have been through the agony of a broken familial relationship.
I am sure that, for all their posturing, both Brooklyn and Harry would love to have their family back in their life – but it’s not that easy. And then, even when the rift is at last repaired, it’s not always in the shape you wished for.
At the beginning of this year, my mother Judith, 81, came back into my life – in a sense anyway. She was found collapsed in her flat by a contractor who had come to do some work there and was rushed to hospital.
I have spent the past 15 years longing for a reunion with my mother – but when I got what I’d been dreaming of it was not quite as expected, writes Ursula Hirschkorn
Ursula’s mother was found collapsed in her flat by a contractor and was rushed to hospital
I didn’t know any of this until my father’s care home – which he moved into two years ago – rang to say she hadn’t visited for a few days. (I haven’t seen my father, Michael, 83, for years, but they have my number.)
Eventually, we managed to piece together the story and I was able to contact the hospital where she had been taken.
I confess it took me a few days to visit. I was scared of how it would make me feel and didn’t know how she would react. Even when a friend offered to come with me I couldn’t work up the courage.
But as her stay in hospital extended from days to weeks and I was acting as next of kin, I knew I had to brace myself to see her.
As I stood outside the hospital in the blazing sun, I rang my 20-year-old son Max for support. I needed some contact with my own family to know I was loved before I stepped through the doors of her ward.
My heart was racing and I was close to tears. I was genuinely terrified to see my own mother. I’d last seen her when I’d helped to get my father into his care home two years before, and it had been a hideous time as she blamed me for moving him away from her. But I was also struggling with the anger I felt towards her. Yes, I felt a duty towards her, but it wasn’t as straightforward as a daughter’s unconditional love for her elderly mum.
In the end, the meeting was awash not with drama but bathos. She was suffering from an infection which meant she wasn’t all there. She had only the vaguest grasp of who I was and was only interested in telling me fantastical tales about my father leaping over tables in a pub garden to impress a woman. (He can’t walk unaided.)
She repeated her story on a loop until I left an hour later. It turned out that it wasn’t just an infection, she was in the early stages of dementia, most likely Alzheimer’s.
Instead of finally making amends and offering apologies for my deeply traumatic childhood, she was unable to remember what I’d been through. It was now my job to act with all the responsibility and care she had rarely shown me, and make sure she was placed in a care home that could meet her needs. For now, she does remember who I am, but nothing of our difficult past. After a decade of no contact at all, I have finally hugged my mum again, but I have not got our relationship back. That is gone for ever.
I would give anything to feel the love for her that should come naturally, but I know that’s wishful thinking. She doesn’t remember if I visit and when I do, she spends most of our chats regaling me with stories of how wonderful my father is, despite his blatant and constant nastiness as I was growing up. Oddly – and infuriatingly – he is preserved in her memory as the beautiful boy she first fell in love with. I nod along as I don’t want to upset her, but it still hurts that she can’t see, and perhaps never saw, what a terrible man he was.
The fact is, my parents were never any good at bringing up a family. They were wrapped in a co-dependent relationship that was more akin to a first teenage romance than a long and often rocky marriage.
My mother admitted she adored my father to the exclusion of all others, including her children. My father was a self-obsessed and belligerent man, but she turned a blind eye to all his faults, blaming any issue on some external factor. He was tired or hungry; his father hadn’t loved him properly; he’d lost his mother when he was in his 20s … there was always some excuse ready to hand.
My parents were never any good at bringing up a family – they were wrapped in a co-dependent relationship, says Ursula
As a child I was often beaten, writes Ursula, adding that she once turned up at primary school with a bruise in the shape of a handprint on her thigh
Once, I forgot to buy him his favourite magazine during a trip to London (we were living in Brussels at the time). I was about 15 and it was typical teenage thoughtlessness. He screamed at me for hours; from the moment I alighted from the train, in front of all the other passengers, to well after we arrived home. My mother fiercely backed him up.
But this was the least of their abuse.
As a child I was often beaten. Once, when I was around five or six, I turned up at primary school with a bruise in the shape of his handprint on my thigh. Social services were alerted, but this was the 1970s when even obvious red flags were often ignored and nothing happened.
As a teenager, when I displeased him, he would slap, kick and emotionally abuse me. He often told me I was fat, ugly and stupid and no one would want me, which was a shame as he couldn’t wait to get me off his hands.
He would frequently sit me down with a spreadsheet and show me all the money I had cost him that month.
I found solace in the moments when I had my mother to myself. Despite her weakness in the face of his anger and violence, she was my only refuge as a little girl.
I remember having competitions with her as to who could last longest without licking their lips while eating a sugar-coated doughnut, or her taking me out to buy a tiny toy car every Friday, or that she would take me for pizza on the rare occasions when my father went away without her.
But she was a different person when he was around.
My stomach would drop every time he walked into a room as she would instantly stop being my mother and start pandering to his moods or needs, and they were rarely positive.
At Christmas he would engineer a fight every single year, goading his target until they inevitably ran from the table in tears, ruining the festivities. He hated it when he wasn’t the centre of attention.
On my 18th birthday, they were away travelling and barely made it home in time to see me, and on my 21st, my father insisted on doing a delivery to a customer (they sold English antique furniture to rich Belgians) and didn’t arrive home until well after 9pm, by which time the celebratory dinner was ruined.
When I told them how upset I was, my father screamed at me that I was being selfish and my mother clucked approvingly in the background.
None of this stopped once I was no longer under his roof.
At university, I took a friend over to Brussels to stay. My father spent the entire time telling her what a horrible person I was, asking her: ‘Don’t you think she’s a nasty bully?’ Eventually, I said enough was enough and we walked out.
He loved to humiliate me in front of friends and boyfriends. He would always ask incredulously what they could possibly like about me.
The worst of this was when I got divorced from my first husband. We’d been childhood sweethearts, getting together at just 17, and probably never should have married, but I craved stability and love after such a rocky childhood.
When I left him after just 18 months of marriage, my father was furious. He liked my ex because he was a successful lawyer and thought he’d finally found someone to offload me on to. After our split, my father would ring him for hours to commiserate – but my mother wasn’t much better. When she called me, she’d cry and complain she would never be a grandmother.
Even when I met a new partner, Mike, who has now been my husband of 22 years, they didn’t stop. When he first met them, they spent the entire meal discussing how wonderful my ex was and wondering out loud what I saw in Mike. It was excruciating.
I wanted my family in my life and I loved my mum, although her blindness to my father’s faults and complete inability to stand up to him continued to grate, writes Ursula
Despite all the pain they caused me over the years, however, they were still my parents and I couldn’t bear to cut them off.
When I found out I was pregnant with my first child in 2003, my mum was the first person I called. I hoped they might turn out to be better grandparents than parents, and, to mum’s credit, she did help enormously with first Jacob, and then with his three brothers, Max, Jonah and Zach.
This was against a backdrop of my father constantly giving her hell for ‘deserting’ him to look after her grandchildren.
Often her visits started with her in tears because of a row he’d sparked and ended with him insisting that she return home immediately.
Despite this I soldiered on. I wanted my family in my life and I loved my mum, although her blindness to my father’s faults and complete inability to stand up to him continued to grate.
Then came possible relief. One early morning in 2009 she rang me to say she wanted to leave him, and I felt a firework of hope explode in my chest that we might finally be free of his malign influence. Had she finally seen the light?
The answer was yes, and no. She told me that she had endured years of abuse – emotional and physical – at his hands and she had finally had enough. He had been flirting with their much younger neighbour and that had been a step too far. I helped to find her a flat not far from where I lived. I went with her to a lawyer to help her get a divorce, set her up with her first solo bank account, and listened to her slowly reveal just how bad a husband my father had been to her.
I welcomed her into the heart of my family with open arms and spent hours discussing how she could start again on her own.
Then I discovered it had all been one big, protracted, battle of wills between the two of them.
One day, when she was meant to be coming over to play with my toddler twins, she simply didn’t turn up. She eventually texted me to say that she was getting back together with my father and that they were at the airport about to go on holiday together. She claimed that all my support during her divorce was just me ‘controlling’ her.
It was then that I decided I couldn’t have them in my life any more.
It was one thing to neglect me, but another to turn her back on my tiny sons, who were just seven, five and two when she jetted off. I was sick of the constant emotional abuse. I was sick of her weakness and complete dependence on my father and, above all, I couldn’t cope with the toll it was taking on my mental health.
After I received that text I fell apart. I was diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression, which still affect me now. I had raging insomnia, often waking from dreams about my mother in tears. I was very unwell for years, struggling to bring up my young family. My sons tell me now that they remember this time when their mum turned into a bit of a zombie.
It was during this time that I decided I had to pick my own health and family over the emotional chaos caused by my parents. It broke my heart to cut them out of our lives, but I do think it was the right choice. Despite deep grief and sadness, I have been calmer.
I have spent years in therapy and working on myself to overcome my childhood trauma. I have brought up my four sons in a loving home and they have grown into successful young men who make me proud every day. I have always put them first and, as a result, our family dynamic is infinitely healthier than the one I came from.
And now my mother is back in my life, albeit in a way that can never give me the satisfaction of knowing that, at last, she has chosen her daughter’s wellbeing over her husband’s vindictiveness. I will never feel that because she will never have the capacity to make that decision.
I also know that our reconciliation, if you can call it that, will be brief. That soon she will forget who I am completely, even who she is, and that the past will become a hazy country that she inhabits as the present slips away.
It is heartbreaking to have to live through the loss of my mother all over again.
But I imagine this must be the way that so many estrangements end. Not with embraces and understanding, but when duty outranks past disagreements.
It is not a happy ending, it is agonisingly sad, but I suspect it is much more common than the fairytale outcomes we all secretly hope for.
