DEMONS

How does a mother do that? 1

How do you shove your six year old daughter out of the car that’s taking you and your new lover to the airport – and a one –way ticket to the other end of the world? 2

How do you tell that six-year old that it’s for the best and that her ‘Auntie’ will be taking care of her from now on? 3

How do you not tell ‘Auntie’ anything at all about what’s going on – just leave it to the bewildered six-year old to do your dirty work? 4

How do you leave your husband without a word – stealing his new baby daughter – if she was his - and abandoning him and your eldest? 5

And how is that abandoned six-year old supposed to survive? 6

Far from answering them Caroline’s ‘natural’ mother never even asked these questions. She did the selfish bidding of the money-mad delinquent she had taken for her lover and absconded with him and Caroline’s baby sister to a place where the law couldn’t reach them and people wouldn’t know their hideous past. She left her bewildered husband and Caroline to manage the devastation she left in her wake. Her husband fell apart immediately and within a year he was drinking heavily. Soon he would succumb to the alcoholism that would deprive Caroline of a father as well as a mother and sister. And the horror-story scenario would be complete. 7

Your destruction ,Caroline ,would take a little longer. 8

In the fairy-tale you had a wicked step-mother and two ugly sisters. Real life gave you Aunt Annie and her two daughters , your neighbours and best friends, Jenny and Julie .Aunt Annie had a heart like a house where she made a big room for you . Jenny and Julie loved you better than most blood relatives could have been expected to. For all that, theirs was a part-time job in bringing you up. Their home was a refuge from the devastation at your own. It was ultimately a place you were always welcome and loved – but it was their home – and not yours. 9

I met you as a teenager , about to have to face the world in a way it had never had to be faced before. And the cracks were beginning to show. For a teenager needs more than a gentle nature and a soft voice and heart. She needs confidence – attitude! She needs bloody-mindedness - and parents to inflict that on. And who did you have? The ruin of your poor father who, God rest him, had always loved you as best his broken heart would allow, denying you nothing , apologetic for and ashamed of his collapse. And your angelic Aunt Annie who loved you like a lioness and for whom you would have died rather than give offence. So at whom could you lash out? Your mother? God knows she deserved it! But half-way round the world in Barbados she was hardly going to be a rewarding target. Her lover’s masterplan from all those years ago was still working well – for him and her. 10

No – there would be only one acceptable target of your teenage angst and rage. Yourself! And from what I now realize was a very great distance indeed , I watched you tear yourself apart and begin the descent towards the jaws of self-destruction and death, dealing with such hideous demons as alcohol, self-loathing, obsessive-compulsion and eating disorders. Like most people around you then , I didn’t know the whole, horrendous story. And like most people I thought, ‘What a shame – such a nice girl – but some people just go like that I guess – the same way some people just get sick’. The horrible truth of course is that you didn’t ‘just go that way’. The root-causes of your behavioural problems were all too obvious. It’s no wonder you went ‘off the rails’. What is a miracle however, is that you prevailed. 11

The ‘Clinic’ helped no doubt. It helped lots of desperate souls and still does. The unfortunate truth however, is that it fails to help most of them on a long-term basis. Because ultimately most people would rather not be helped if it means having to stop blaming the world for their woes and stop hating the perpetrators of the sins they believe have brought them there. God and I both know that, of all people, you had a more than perfect right to feel just that way. When Moses’ mother floated him down the Nile in a basket, she at least had his best interests at heart - and could say that heart was breaking. Too young to know what a basket was , let alone a basket-case, the young Moses later over-compensated to a degree which saw him lead a slave nation to freedom. I’ve met people like Moses . Driven people. They get things done. But they’re a pain in the **. And compared to what you went through, a few years in slavery, a few years in the wilderness and a plague or two seem like an absolute dawdle. 12

Yet you forsook your right to be bitter and got on with the job of putting your life together. I was going to say ‘back together’ – but that’s not the way it was. The twelve steps were no rebuild for you. You didn’t reach for them like a drowning man grabs at a life-line. You took them and made them a back-bone to a whole new life you would invent for yourself. You did more than recover. You transcended. You found it in your enormous heart to forgive. Everybody! You traveled to Barbados to reconcile with your mother. To her eternal shame she was unable to accept your forgiveness and failed you a second time. You forgave all of us who had failed to see your pain, too busy with our own trivial cares .But most of all you forgave yourself. For the sins you never committed – but for which you had always carried the guilt . 13

Caroline, there are demons in this world. We watch out for them and pray that they will never come our way or the way of our loved ones .We pray to be spared such terrible things as happened to a six-year old girl forty years ago. But the real demons are not the ones who push us out of cars and leave us at the mercy of a cruel world. Or who bomb us or fly airplanes into buildings. The real demons always live within us. Fear of them and a refusal to do battle with them leads us to do the terrible things to ourselves and to others. Having the courage and the will to face and defeat those demons – to conquer our very selves- is a truly rare thing. 14

With your soft voice and your gentle , unassuming nature you cut an unlikely figure for a super-hero. Yet you are my Wonder-Woman, Spiderman and Lara Croft all rolled into one. Unlike in the movies the battle doesn’t end the war for the happy-ever-after to move in and immediately make everything perfect. You fight your war each day, quietly , patiently , with love and with dignity. I watch you do it. And I can only stand and wonder at you. 15

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