Family

"Family; a group of people who are related to each other."

Why is family important to me? What sort of family did I grow up in?

This was the question asked by Nickie from Typecast as part of the weekly Writing Prompt Link she is giving to raise awareness of the CLIC Sargent Do Something Yummy campaign. 

"Thank goodness you can choose your friends" is a phrase that I have heard a lot over the years. It is true that family can make you feel like that sometimes. I often felt like that growing up. Mine was a bit of a dysfunctional family. Maybe in today's society, it would be considered more normal, but when I was younger, I felt a bit like a square peg in a round hole.

My early childhood memories are of my parents arguing, my mum being upset and occasionally being dragged out and walking to my grandparents at strange times of the night. When I was seven, there was a lot of screaming and shouting and my mum went crazy and started throwing all of my dad's things out of the bedroom window. Then he was gone and everything changed. Mum cried. A lot. We had to sell our much-loved house with it's lovely garden and move into a flat above a pub, where the bathroom was so cold, the toothpaste used to freeze in the winter. Being seven, no-one explained why or what, I just had to draw my own conclusions and to be honest, I'm not sure I would have understood anyway, but I saw my mum throw my dad out of our house and our lives and I pretty much resented her for years to come and put him on a pedestal.

Many years later, I realised that my mum had done the absolute best thing she could have ever done. My 'amazing' father was a serial philanderer, liar and petty criminal and I had spent years punishing her for trying to protect us from that and all the while she'd had to pick herself up, brush herself down and work extremely hard to ensure that we had food on the table and a roof over our heads.

So, growing up, my family really consisted of my mum (I was an only child) and my grandparents who I was also close to. I longed for the normality of a stable family and would have given my right arm for siblings.

When I fell pregnant with O seventeen years ago, I had only been going out with his father for a few months and although we were madly in love at that time, it was that rose-tinted spectacle time in the relationship and having a baby certainly made everything a whole lot clearer. Sadly, we didn't really like each other at all and had opposing views on everything. There were arguments and when O turned three, I saw the effect the arguments were having on him and it brought back sad memories of me when I wasn't much older, so we made the difficult decision to separate.

Not long after, I met my future husband. I knew very early on that things would be different this time and that he was the 'one'. We had similar tastes, ideas, beliefs and often said the same things. We now have three wonderful children together and my eldest son is a part of that family, even though he spends a lot of time with his dad as well. 

To me, family is more that just a group of people who are related to each other.  My family give me love and support and hope.  They make me laugh and cry but when I look at them, I have the most overwhelming pride and love.  I am extremely lucky and I know from my own experiences and from the experiences of  others, that not everyone is so lucky.

Yummy Mummy is a fund raising campaign run by CLIC Sargent, the children's cancer charity. For the last six years mums all across the UK have been raising money by taking part in Yummy Mummy Week.  Yummy Mummy week takes place this year between the 10th and 18th March.  Click on the logo to find out more and get involved.  Do something yummy.