A Mother's Nightmare. Part one.

So in the words of the prolific writer, Enid Blyton, or at least the wonderful actress Helena Bonam Carter, who played her recently in the BBC drama "Enid" (available as I write on BBC iplayer) "...if you want to write, you just sit down and write..." My childhood was enriched by the books of this wonderful children's author. Yet she was obviously a very strange person indeed and a questionable mother for sure. How could someone write such magical and appealing books for children and yet have absolutely no clue to how to relate to her own? If how she is portrayed in this story is true, it surely shows how deeply affected we really are by events in our childhood, whether we are aware of it, or not. Anyway, I shall take her words to my heart, stop procrastinating, sit down, and write.

My dear friend in Zurich is going through unimaginable trauma. She is so often on my mind and I find it hard to understand how such terrible things can have come to happen to an essentially good and hard working woman. I met her when we were students learning to speak French, newcomers to Quebec, Canada. She took one look at me, decided I was most certainly for her, put her arm round me at break time and announced we would be friends. Slightly shyer and more retiring, probably than I am now, I was not going to argue with 5 foot 9 Polish woman. We bonded a few weeks later when she came with some other Polish friends and relatives to our flat for afternoon tea and cake and left at 2.30 am after copious quantities of vodka shots, drunk from shot glasses held in hands with arms linked, songs had been sung and stories shared.

Time went on, she married a man, another Polish guy who had moved to Canada many years prior, with his family. A serious, quiet man who worked for Canadian Immigration. An odd match I always felt, she so beautiful, smart and outgoing, he more awkward, of slow and deliberate speech, wanting things his way....

We borrowed a Cadillac from my husband's colleague and drove them from the Registry Office to her new husband's family place in the Laurentian hills. A simple celebration outside in the summer sun, check table clothes and wonderful homemade food. And vodka. The main 'wedding' was to take place in G's hometown in Poland some weeks later.

They settled down, G working hard to earn her degree in biochemistry, her husband continuing with his 9-5 for the government. G got her first 'proper' job, which she loved and started to do really well.

We visited them some years later on a rare trip back to Canada and were introduced to their new family, a little girl and a new born boy that G was still tenderly breastfeeding. She told me she would have to return to work to support the family and that her husband would stay home because financially that was just how it needed to be. I knew deep down that this suited G, she had worked hard for her position and as much as she clearly adored her children, full time motherhood was just not for her, as it indeed hadn't been for her own mother.

.....to be continued.