text: And that was that. Dear Mother: I write to you now, after many decades of not speaking to you, at the request of my psychologist. She said a letter to you would help, that it would help me organize my thoughts, reflect on everything that had happened, put it in some sort of logical order and digest this entire ordeal. She said that it would still help me, even if you never read this. I hope she is right. You know, I never thought that you were a person who enjoyed conflict. When I was very young, maybe 3 or 4, I got into trouble at school for fighting with one of the other kids. The head teacher must’ve called you in the middle of work and asked you to come to the school. You looked at the other kid’s parents apologetically and excused my behavior, even though I was insisting that the other kid started it. The teacher made us leave the room. I remember the other kid’s face was red and sweaty, his bright blond hair mismatched heavily with how red and swollen his face was. I thought he looked like a clown. When we were allowed back into the room, that jet black hair of yours was covering your face as you were looking down. I remember the mixture of warmth over pain on my bottom after father was done with me. I remember you cried while he spanked me, as you echoed, over and over again my lie to my angered father: “The other kid started it. He was just defending himself.” I suppose when God made you and father, he put all of the anger in him, knowing that you’d end up together. He probably hoped that you would balance each other out, and balance out you did. Father’s harshness, his quick anger, and whatever called him to the bottle slowly flowed onto you. Similarly, your calmness, the way you waited before answering a question, and your loving nature towards Ella and I, flowed onto him. You started smoking too, and the house would always smell of your cigarettes and his pipe. One day, you were staying out late at your new job in the law firm. He would usually stay on his couch and read, or watch football, and wasn’t really present in our lives except when it came to discipline us. That day, I do not know why, we walked into the living room and shyly asked him if he would read to us, since you were gone. In all honesty, Ella and I were terrified of Father, but he looked at us standing on the doorway, turned off the TV, emptied his pipe and picked a book from a nearby shelf. That was the first day he read to us at night, Kafka of all things. I would never say this to your face, especially after you spent such a long time doing it, but he had something that made him so much better than you. I don’t know what it was, but ever since that day, Ella and I would secretly look forward to the nights where you’d work late. I never thought I would look forward to time alone with dad, but there we were. When I was at university and decided to choose Child Psychology as my major, in order to become a teacher later on, the father that came back from the ship when I was young would have called me a pussy. This father of mine, years after he stopped fishing and started making ice-cream, looked at me for a few seconds and slowly said: “The pay won’t be good, kids can be real bastards sometimes, but if this is what you want to do with your life, Godspeed.” He said without blinking. In the years that followed I left home and went to university. I do not know how you guys managed to ship me all the way from Appledore to London, but you did. In there I found people from all around the world...the 2000s were booming. Social networks became a thing, and with it, I thought ideas that would benefit all of us would spread around the country, leading to a better, more united United Kingdom. How silly, and how grandiose this sounds now, in retrospect, years later. It is a well known disease that the young are especially vulnerable to, the delusions that they can fix the world, that it’s only them that know and that everybody else is just getting in the way. I led a very busy life during those years. I shared bedrooms with countless youngsters like myself. I was both charming and unbothered by thoughts of settling down with any one of the many women that graced me with their presence on those days, until gonorrhea paid a visit that was. I bet that if I were to go visit my uncles they would still talk about it. “So I get a call from my brave son, Carl, one day, and he asks me about the weather, about his sister, and all of that. Five minutes haven’t passed since I picked up the phone, and he has the balls on him to say, he says” Cigarette drag. “Mom, I’m only asking for a friend, and please do keep this private, but is it normal for men to piss blood from time to time?” Fucking hell Mom. The explosion of laughter at that dinner party was unlike anything I’ve heard before. It still haunts me to this day. I will never hear the end of that. A quick dose of antibiotics and some very embarrassing conversations later, I figured out that maybe monogamy was an interesting topic to approach. It pains me greatly to think about this, because my path to commitment took me onto the path that has taken us so far away. How do you love and hate something at the same time? Lisa knows this. We’ve both grown more together than ever in these last years. I think we’re bound by a weird mixture of commitment, love and pain. She is aware of the responsibility and the part that she played in all of this. She was the one that started me onto the path of politics. It started slowly. The debate group that she and I started slowly walked us towards more politically active youngsters. Then we attended our first party meetings, to finally join Young Labour. I now understand that it isn’t even a problem with the Labour party at all, we could have been caught by a conservative wave for all that I care. I get it now... there is this, really dark idea out there. This idea destroyed our lives mom, and it has somehow taken root in us all, through social media, through the news, through forums and through government bulletins. The idea that if you do not agree with someone politically, that person is not worth keeping around in your life. And you know the funniest thing Mom? I don’t even remember what it was. It could have been abortion rights, it could have been Brexit, it could have been the monarchy, or the IRA, or the nuclear weapons, or the fucking fish, or gay marriage, or the NHS. I don’t remember what it was and yet it haunts me. I’ve had a bloody hypnotist paid to try and dig whatever the fuck we were arguing about out of my head, because I must remember. I must remember Mom, because it seemed so important back then... Right? It seemed more important than the dinner that you had spent hours cooking, or how much you had looked forward to seeing us, or the fact that we were expecting twins, or the fact that Ella was getting married. I remember how angry I was that you, especially you, would not walk that statement back. Lisa was right there with us, you couldn’t possibly sound so radical. I remember Ella’s face when dad punched the table and told me to apologize. I remember how she quietly cried when I looked into dad’s blue eyes, held his gaze and said no. I remember how proud I was to be on the right side and how disappointed I was in you that you were on the wrong side. I remember walking out of the house, my soup still warm and untouched, Lisa’s hand on mine, my babies growing in her womb. I remember the post that I wrote about it later on my blog, and I remember how many likes I got, 7,989. I remember all of it, but I cannot, so help me God, remember why we had that stupid, stupid argument. But we had it, and like Granny would’ve said: “...And that was that!” The years passed and our daughters grew up without grandparents. Ella had to struggle and fight between her love for us and her nieces with the constant need to repair something broken over such a small thing. I was so stubborn. Our daughters grew up asking why they only had two grandparents. I told them that you were bad people. Can you believe that Mom? I told your grandkids that you were bad people. You would call and I would not pick up, I would tell Ella that I wanted a written apology, but I would never open your letters, or your cards. Lisa wanted us to make amends too, at least I suspect this, we’ve never talked about it really. Maybe she was also caught by whatever had me in its claws, but I choose to think that women are wiser than us, and that she realized we should have reconciled. Lisa never threw any of your letters away. She says they must be in a box somewhere, and each weekend I clear a bit more of the storage space that we have rented to see if I can find them. I want to read those letters mom. I remember the call. Your calls I would ignore, but Dad had never called me once in all of these years. So I picked up. I remember Dad’s voice, I had never heard his voice waver before and it scared me. “Mom’s been hit by a drunk driver Son.” “Dad?” “Mom’s been hit by a drunk driver, and they don’t think she’s going to make it. You should come home son, as soon as you can.” I remember thinking that I was angry at you. I was angry because I thought you were some conservative troglodyte Mom. I have never speeded like I did then. I got a thousand pound fine, and I had to apply for a new license, and it was all for nothing because when I got to the hospital you were dead. The kindest, calmest, most hard-working person I’ve known was dead. When they showed me your body I felt relief, because that couldn’t be you. That wasn’t your face, your hair couldn’t be so white, it hadn’t been that long... Right? But it had been that long, and I wasted all of those years behaving like a self-righteous prick, and I can never fix that. When I apologize at your grave, nothing answers back. It’s like when I asked you something back when I was a kid, and you would take just that extra time to think about it, but this time it just goes on forever. I can’t remember why we argued, mom, and it’s fucking killing me. I just think that you would have been a terrific grandmother. Dad is a husk of a man since you’ve been gone, but he really enjoys his grandkids and it’s the only thing that makes him smile nowadays. He never talks about our fight and we have gotten much closer over these years. When he gets older he’ll move into the house with us and we’ll take care of him mom, I promise. I still can’t find your letters but I will. I am sometimes overwhelmed by all of it and I end up with the darkest thoughts.. Nobody that put these ideas onto my head gives a single fuck that you’re dead and I will never be able to make amends with you, or take any of this back. I don’t even know what to do with this bloody letter. I just hope that you can read this, and if you do, know that I was a proper idiot, and that I know I was and every day I try to walk further away from that person that I used to be. I will make sure that your granddaughters grow up to be kinder to us than I was to you.