I've been in a strange headspace lately, because my dreams are repetitive by nature and cyclic in the way they arrive in the darkest of hours, to remind me. You lost it all.
I have recurring dreams at the best of times and I'm sure it's indicative of unhealed trauma and a broken heart beating in it's own way, mourning the loss of something and collating the options as my subconscious rifles through the archives of grief to present what it thinks I'm searching for. Like a 90's computer, the grind and clunk of the junk to find the right file.
Of late? It's the villa in Spain, forgive the overbearing middle class nature of that statement. Not just any villa, the most beautiful, white washed, epitome of privildge nestled in the Mijas mountains in the Costa Del Sol. A step into millionaires mansions and away from the dreary, leary boozing of the beaches down below, it glitters like a palace in the sunshine and the cobbled steps down to the expanse of house, terrace, gardens, pool, shimmer in my mind as if I were there yesterday.
My entire childhood. My teenage years. My early twenties. All there. Easter holidays, weeks and weeks over summer school breaks, a cheeky October week away to bridge the need for warmth in the run up to cold English winters. A Monarch flight or 50, zooming from Manchester to Malaga, like clockwork, as a family we had it down to a fine art.
Flight, car hire, same company for 15 years or more, a traditional Seat Ibiza, manual to make my mother sweat - not from 30c heat, but from driving a stick and not an automatic German beast of BMW or Mercedes. Suitcases, one per person, not like my life now, where baggage is free and crammed into cost cutting hand luggage sizing to save on the price of hold luggage!
Mine? A United Colours of Benetton hefty black plastic suitcase, with colourful corners - a Christmas present from years gone by, and back in the 90's, accompanied by a matching heavy black plastic vanity case - essential travel aesthic for a white middle class posh girl from Cheshire.
I dream of this place all the time.
It's memories, or it's fantasies. Often I struggle to separate the two anymore because my whole past life feels like a dream and something that came to me whilst losing my mind in a prison cell. Did I imagine the whole thing and this life I once had, never really existed?
But it did. Suitcase and all.
I dream of our family friends, every holiday with them, joined at the hip, parents, kids, and long summer nights. My dad manning the BBQ, cooking my favourite fillet of pork with his magical soy glaze that only tastes good when he makes it, ample dining outside on the south side terrace, laden, grotesque in abundance. Bottles of Vina Sol, white, dark Rioja's and cold bottles of Diet Coke dotted up and down for two families who share life.
But always uncomfortable even then, shrinking into my sarong, hiding my shape, slinking up and down a table of salads, casting glances at a disapproving mother willing me not to touch the carbs and keep it minimal and appropritate. Summers of obesity or what I perceived to be, squeezed into size 14 swimsuits, bought at a shop off Deansgate in Manchester, where one buys a swimsuit and then pops to San Carlo to lament the size of the purchase.
Summers of defiance, get thin, get fucked, the burberry bikini that lives rent free in mind, even now at the age of 38. 18 year old me never looked so good and it made my mum so mad, she'd lost some of her ammunition, she'd lost a reason to hate and berate. The fat frump of a daughter, now so blonde and beautiful and burberry clad - baby pink with the classic Burberry etching. With tits that sat so buyoantly, fucking incredible.
I dream of that place. I dream of that Fran I suppose.
But I was so miserabe. All of the time. Every single holiday. What felt like an opporunity to relax and do what people do on holiday, have downtime, family time, became a source of dread for me. It always felt too easy an opportunity for my parents to hyperfocus on my flaws, my character, my isolation, my awkwardness and all the things we know now - abject, overwhelming anxiety, crippling EUPD and bi-polar, wrapped up in a traumatised teenage mind. I was a nightmare. But I was their nightmare.
I think of the last time I spent time with them there; my mother had the classic sigh of exasperation when she saw me walk through the door, genuine disdain. It was almost a frustration and inconvience I was there and I remember thinking at the time "will you ever look at me any other way?" and as I type this now, I feel the pain of what that feeling was, because the answer was, as it is now, NO.
My brother posts still, non-chalantly, from the north facing terrace, on the expensive rattan furniture, little social media snapshots of cold glasses of wine, with his wife and child, in that very same villa. Family. Abroad.
The severance hurts me still. The resentment probably just as much.
However, I sat to write this blog today, because there has been an echo, a ripple, that I can't shake, that's being drawn from these recurring dreams.
The audacity.
I woke up one day in my mid 20's to a text from my mother, not just any day. Christmas Eve morning, 2010.
"We think it's best if you don't come tomorrow,"
No more was said.
Not much more has been said since to be honest, only viterol and venom in response to my sad looking olive branches and cries for help and reconnection over the years.
The phasing out of Fran had been in motion long before that message, years in fact. With every fuck up and faux pas I made, it reverberated through their lives and their words, louder and harsher than I could have ever imagined. I never needed a court of law to define me, or decide what kind of person I am, my parents were doing it long before the gavel banged.
I was written off.
I was a liar, a cheat, a thief, a drug addict, a drama queen a lesbian. And to be honest, they could never quite decide which of those attributes they hated the most - but I did.
Me. Just me.
We jarred on every aspect of who I was, or trying to become. I couldn't be fat. I couldn't be stupid. I couldn't be broken. I couldn't be gay. I couldn't be embarassing.
So one day I was thin. One day I was straight. One day I was clean. One day I was smiling. One day I was perfect. It didn't matter.
Pretty straight Fran with the long blonde hair, going off to University to study Politics and become something, someone, with the burberry bikini and the big tits, all the boys chasing her. Fast cars, lots of money, Selfridges shopping, Moschino sunglasses, Louis Vuitton handbags and it never changed a thing. All it did was confuse me. Who was I meant to be? Because I turned myself into every version of Fran to find the right one and none seemed to fit.
By the time I ended up in prison, I understood whole heartedly how I had got there. This lack of identity, this fraility of self. Yes.
But it was the grief. The loss and the hurt. It poisoned me from the inside out. And the angry girl who was consumed by a sense of abandonment at 3, seemed to be living a life on loop. Parents don't love you. They leave you. Parents don't protect you. They hurt you. I'd had two sets that proved that to be true. So I became everything they thought I was. And I felt so alone.
When I was adopted, I thought I'd found the safe place, the space, to grow in love and hope and happiness. That my mum and dad were going to help heal me, and show me who I was supposed to be. I watched my brother become this perfect son and I couldn't grasp why I wasn't that.
I grew up in the sphere of my parents influence, friends and family, like gravity, like orbit, circling my life. I didn't have anyone on the outside. I wasn't good at making friends. I was too confusing to make and keep friends like other people did. I didn't know who I was, so I couldn't be reliable in conventional friendship. I was too busy evolving, shape shifting and being a square peg in a round hole. Jay found it easy, he was a natural, charasmatic, beautiful to look at, enigmatic, he had become my father. Although I find that much less appealing a quality now I'm grown.
This small life, was my entire life. Completely depending upon the people who raised me to tell me who to be, to finance my life, to pull my strings. And by proxy, the people in their life. I grew up thinking I had a full life, because I was always surrounded by people. Noise. Social events. It never stopped. I remember watching Titanic in the cinema at aged 11 (naughty!) and Kate Winslet said "I'm standing in the middle of a crowded room, screaming at the top of my lungs, and no-one looks up," and it stopped me in my tracks - EXACTLY. - her character then proceeded to consider jumping off the back of a ship, so again, I can relate!
These people that filled my life, they don't exist anymore. They all evaporated overnight. And for all the things I've been, all the things I've done right, all the things I've done wrong - I will never understand it. And that sense of abandonment hurts me even now. Which is why I dream of the villa. It's the physical representation of my loss and my abadonment. Not by family. But by all.
The friends we summered with? Gone. Not a word for nearly 20 years. I've been homeless, I've been trafficked, I've been an addict, in rehab, in prison, I've been raped, I've been in pain.
Silence.
These friends - when I was first adopted, my mums best friend, gave birth - I sat and looked at this newborn baby and asked her "So are you going to keep it? Or are you giving it back?"
It made everyone cry.
The hilarity. The hypocrisy.
Such a tragic world view for such a little girl and yet they all proved my theory to be true.
If you don't like it, you give it back.
I was frozen out. By them all. They took the word of the people who broke me and disowned me and never bothered to question the validity and depth of such reasoning. None wondered what kind of parents disown their adoptive child.
So I suppose that says more about them then it does about me.
I was easily accepted as the pariah. The pepertrator of pain and hurt.
Every single person I grew up with, every single one. From the age of 4 to 23. Gone. Overnight.
I've spent so long healing from the pain and loss of my family and mourned them like death itself, because it is; to us both, I hadn'd addressed the pain and loss of my entire life.
I've spent so long trying to be perfect. Imploding TheBarkerBaker was proof of that. Success and visiblity and shining my light in everyones face, that would catch their attention right? Then they would see I was worth keeping around, contacting, reaching out too? Right?
Not even a fall from grace and a prison sentence provoking a hello.
I look at my life now, so full, of all the right people - so soulful, authentic, loving, generous with their friendship and acceptance of all the Fran's I have been and the person they love and value.
I was never unlovable. But everything about the first 20 years of my life screamed that I was. Every person in the first 20 years of my life proved that. Screamed that. Re-inforced that. I was so fragile. Truly, a lost little girl asking the world to love her and never leave her. And they all did. And it broke my heart. Worse than that, it broke my sense of self and sent me into a spiral of wondering if I could be loved, trusted, accepted, and kept.
I don't miss my middle class wonderment of fancy things. I miss the fact I had a life once that I thought meant something to the people in it.
The recurring dream of the villa, it comes as I fear the loss of these people even though they're not in my life. I saw the father of the family we holidayed with and adored, died and I was quietly devastated. He was Donald Duck, he would make silly voices and tell silly stories. He bought me a little bean bag ball from Knowsley Safari park the first time we met post adoption. He made awkward jokes when he got cancer that made everyone cringe. I don't know why he died. Age? If so, my parents are one foot in the grave too. But I felt it, from a distance. It's not like I could go to the funeral. I'm still existing in the shadows, and forfeited the right to mourn and do what other people do because the Barkers said so. I thought of sending flowers, I didn't want it to cause upset. So I just sent condolences to one of the kids I grew up with at the lose of their father. I didn't get a reply.
I suppose, for me, those I loved and lost, will fade away one by one.
I haven't existed for a long time so it makes no difference.
I'll hold onto rose tinted versions of villas and what space they hold in my heart and hope it time, the healing of that lost life, fades too.
