Growing up, my mum and I said some awful things to eachother.
It's fair to say, she was happy to continue that when we separated.
I remember vividly sitting in my room, cross legged on my bed, seething. A burning anger. One that became the undertone of how I felt about her. Not anymore. I let it all go.
But in my late teens, I sat angry. Alot.
We'd argued. She had done what is now known in our house as the notoroious "Christine," which is a firm grip of the chin, where she would pull me face to look at her and demand for me to repeat whatever childish thing I'd said.
In this instance, "What did you just say?" was met with me repeating something I still regret now. Even more so in the context of what I'm about to write.
"I said, there is a reason you couldn't have kids,"
Brutal, and of all the words we exchanged through two decades of war, these were ones I wish I could take back. I'd been sat on the bed thinking it, feeling it, rage coursing through me. Why did she hate me so? She wanted kids so much she went through the labourious process of getting two, so what couldn't she just love me? In every action, every word, whether she realised it at the time, or now, aging into 70's with a memory loss that is specific to me, I don't exist, I'm not mentioned, and even people who knew me back then, I'm sure in 2026, wonder if I was real, because with the passing of time. Francesca Barker ceases to exist in past, present or future. Just a memory of a little blonde girl with a cockney accent, who turned into the heartbreak of her parents.
She was never short of a response in viterol, that remains true even now. So when I said those words, I'd expected a painful heartbreak, a flinch, to release me from her grip and her anger. I thought it would wound, thats why I said it. I'll never know if it did or it didn't. My words and actions have pierced her cold heart one too many times to know which one's landed and which ones rolled right off. She, on the other hand, has always known where to gouge me, and her response that day, will live with me, as much as some of our other verbal tangles.
I sat in a prison in 2021, talking through these war of words, my regrets, my pain, my parents, and the loss of who I was and all I had. Those of you who read this blog will know the advice I was given from a woman who has proven to be the catalyst in my mental health recovery - the therapist wonder woman, Cath "Fran you have two choices, you can keep going down the road and expecting it to change and we both agree you've turend yourself inside out trying that, or you can do whats best for you, and leave them in the past. It's today, and you live for you, you're parents, are dead, buried, you mourn and you move on,"
Best advice ever given. Brutal, as brutal as I've been. But honest. I suppose I've been that too in my own way.
I meant it when I said it to her, that there was a reason she couldn't have kids, because I felt in that moment, and for me, I still do, at 38, she shouldn't have been my mother. We both wish she wasn't. Gosh such frank honesty, its horrendous to read it back. It feels cold and callous and without gratitude. I was always told to feel grateful, I was always told I was ungrateful. But that was always designed around things. Not grateful for people, for love, relationships, kindness, friendship, ambition, opporunity. It was ski holidays, it was shopping in Selfridges, it was a mobile phone paid for. I was never taught what real gratitude looks like. Sarah taught me that. It's in the little things.
I sat cross legged on my bed yesterday. I had a small cry. It was an echo twenty years later.
"There is a reason you couldn't have kids," except this time it's the dark space in my brain and my heart speaking to the other side, calling out the worse and the weakness in my greatest fear.
That the reason baby barker-mills evades me, is because I'm not made for this and my biology is trying to tell me that.
I know it's irrational, but I can gurantee every woman who's been in this position feels it too. That we're failing at the one thing we're supposed to do.
On Wednesday evening, I went to the Doctors, and I knew, before I go there, what the converstion, the pelvic examination and gentle chat was going to be. And it was. I didn't cry. I didn't act out. I didn't react at all.
I went back into the waiting room and Sarah was sat there with a look of anxiety and anticipation.
"Yep," I said and she grasped me tighter than ever. We had a hug and I invoked my mothers emotional response, which is "I don't want to cry in public,"
So we left, hand in hand. And in a bewildered haze, we went to get some food, I wanted a beer, I wanted a moment, to process. I didn't eat, I didn't drink. I didn't enjoy the moment we had together to be anywhere but the doctors office.
That was Wednesday. After a full day in the office. A train ride that lasted forever knowing what was on the other side of it. Thursday is a blur. My beautiful best friend provided sweet remedy in childish nature, knowing my regressive tendendicies, if I can't talk, I do, I fill time. So we had a twenty something revival and had a night of nonsense and it was divine. More alcohol than a fresher, shots, beers, a touch of class in the middle with some tapas and posh fizz, and the debauchery, kareoke, screaming Hakuna Matata into microphones drinking cans of Hooch. It was the reminder I was human, and loved that I needed.
We went bowling, I felt my new size 16 jeans slip a little and it made me smile with a strange pride, half of manchester was going to see my lovely thong - you're welcome, but it was a reminder, this fragile fragmented Fran moment; I've come so far in this journey. 4 stone lost. A health reincarnation that I never thought possible. A food noise of 30 years quieted. The ability to choose with the freedom of thought, how to eat, what to eat, when to move, hike, gym, when to eat the Big Mac without the weight of the world and my saddle bag bottom on my shoulders.
No saddle bags here friend. Size 16 jeans, clung to a pert bototm, some iron clad thighs that leg press nearly into the 200's. With ovaries that function without failure, now in clock work expectation and sycronisation. LH test strips that light up like Christmas on time, each time, basal body temperatres that rise and fall like cinematic crescendo month on month. I've jumped through every hoop, I've dropped more weight than a small cow, but more than that, I've saved my own life and paved the way to create another. At least I thought so. But still, in this new vessel, it won't stick. Literally. Still failing.
"It's nothing you've done wrong, you did nothing wrong," said the GP.
It falls on empty ears.
If I hear that one more time I'm going to scream.
I had to explain to him the delicate nature of feeling the joy of a pregnancy remains a marred, tarred and triggering experience for me. For anyone in our situation, it should be met with joy. For me, I'm 19 again, I've been told I'm pregnant and I'm spiralling because the immaculate conception was not one of choice, it was made for me. And I hated every second of it. I felt like there was a poison inside me, and I counted down every day until I could have it eviserated.
I remember having a scan, I asked not to see it, the sonographer was judgemental, I think she thought I was some silly student who had gotten herself up the duff and now making a decision she didn't necessarily approve of. She printed the scan and left the room, she placed it on top of my notes. I looked. I shouldn't have looked. If I had known that now aged 38 that that image would be my most successful pregnancy to date, maybe I would have been kinder to the toxicity I felt was growing inside me.
So the story comes full circle, 19 year old Fran, complicated abortion, news of an added extra for an STI from the monster defiler; and I'm sick, but holding it together because I have to go home and play the role of Francesca Barker for Christmas.
Breaches of trust are not unusual in the timeline of Barkers; I tell my family GP, my GP, who is a close friend of my parents, that I'm worried, that I'll have to hide the fact I've had the abortion but that I'm still sick and need to be well enough to get through Christmas in Cheshire. That if something happens and I feel worse, they'll find out. It must have been less than 20 minutes later, I got a hysterical phone call from my father - the GP, the friend, had told him. After 10 minutes of hysteria, with him wanting to know why I had had an abortion, another incoming call, my mother.
She was furious. When was she not?
"How could you be so fucking selfish?"
The question flawed me. I was confused.
She was furious, I'd conceived a baby and I'd gotten rid of it.
For a woman who wanted her own baby, pregnancy, she was raging.
It was 10 years later they heard the truth of the pregnancy. In a court the first time I got in trouble. My defence team shared the horror story of a rape, a pregnancy, something that triggered an unravelling and a split in Fran who tells the truth and Fran who tells lies. Fran tells lies, because shes never been taught the safety of what it is to tell the truth. My father stood in that court room and listened to how this horrific incident was exacerbated by my avoidance to report it to the police, that when they contacted me about another woman's incident, I denied it, I said I had no idea what they were talking about. I wasn't willing to make a statement about this man. That I lived with the scars physical and mental of what happened.
When my mum demanded to know who the father was, I lied, I said I got drunk and fucked a rugby player - of course, a one night stand. She called me a stupid slut.
I think that's probably what my name is in her phone.
So, it's been quite a week.
It's Saturday. Sarah continues to look at me like I'm about to break. I don't think she realises, not for herself, and not for me either, that this week's tragedy hasn't really settled in our hearts.
I'm somewhere between feeling the pride and joy of knowing my body did what it was supposed to, somoene give me a medal, because I did it, all on my own, no meds, no interventions, just me my ovaries and I. I just couldn't hold it. It seems to be a new mountain to climb. Because why would it be that simple?
It rarely is in the life of the Barker-Mills.
We will heal, quietly, get back on the horse undoubtedly, as I face down turning 39 mid-year, the clock feels like it's ticking louder.
And this convulted piece of emotional exorcism will remain a quiet space to say things on paper, I can't say outloud.
But it will get better.
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