I spent yesterday at the CyberMummy conference – an experience I’ll write more about later this week – and as we mostly only “knew” each other online we had little badges to wear around our neck with the title of our blog and our name on. Of course, many of you might not be aware that the title of this blog is “Adventures of a Lady in Training” or what it means to me so after answering that a few times yesterday, I thought I’d share. This is likely to be long, intimately personal and full of emotion. It’s the first time I’ve felt that I have the right to share this element of my life in such a public manner and I hope that I can do it justice without hurting anyone.

I’ve written 700 words of this, deleted it, written 376 words and deleted that. I can’t tell my story because I have an innate fear of hurting other people, even if I’m the one who has been hurt. I had a fairly bogstandard “nobody understands me” kind of teenage experience and left home/was kicked out a month after my 16th birthday – the day after my Higher English exam and the day before my Higher Maths exam. Whether it was the less-than-stellar home life I’d experienced or simply my hormones being crazy insane I had a longing to be a Mum myself. This is something I’ve talked at length about with my friends, I have always – for as long as I can remember – been broody and even now with four children who test my every boundary I don’t feel that longing has been satisfied. As a result, when I met Findlay’s Dad it suddenly became imperative that I had a baby. Looking back we had a seriously dysfunctional relationship – one that took us both a long time to get over – but when you’re 18 you know everything better than everyone else around you, don’t you? I discovered I was pregnant with Findlay and that weekend, discovered that my parents were splitting up because my Mum had been having a relationship with someone else.

I think you can only understand the hurt and pain that comes out of that kind of marriage breakup if you’ve been a part of it. My sisters were only 14 & 13 and my brother Callum was 9 the weekend my Mum left. I’m sitting here with tears streaming down my face as I remember walking into my parents house seconds after the kids had been told what was happening. The ramifications were and have been widespread but as I have joked since it was almost the perfect time to tell our families that I was pregnant because the heat was truly off us. Selfish? Perhaps, but when you’re 18 and think you know everything you don’t quite see it like that.

Findlay was born 3 months after my 19th birthday and right from the off I felt under pressure to be better than any other parent because I was so young. Findlay’s Dad came home from work one day and I suggested that we get married to solidify our family unit and he agreed, so when Findlay was 4 months old we did. And when Findlay was 9 months old – the day before my 20th birthday – he left. We have a very good relationship these days – in fact I’d almost go as far as to say I count him and his lovely partner as friends – but I can’t and won’t ever forgive him for leaving us like that even if I have some empathy for his reasoning. I did not cope with my parents’ separation well and expended a lot of energy being angry at my Mum, supportive of my Dad and just being there for my siblings which was obviously to the detriment of our relationship. For the next three years I was 100% certain we’d reunite, which was a deeply unhealthy mindset to have when you’re getting involved in new relationships. We would fight, threaten one another with legal action and then put on a brave face in front of Findlay because the one thing I was so, so certain of was that I WOULD not and COULD not have Findlay ever feel the way I did when I was growing up. I felt like an oddity, a spare part. Like I didn’t belong – to an extent, I still feel like this – and it’s damaging. I wanted better for my son.

I started keeping a blog at Blurty and then Livejournal not long after Findlay’s Dad and I split up but when I met Bob and realised what a proper healthy partnership should be like, everything changed. Some of you will have done the maths yourself but we delivered Nairn – a pregnancy we both planned and dearly wanted – into our family 13 months after our first kiss. Erica followed 14 months later and I decided that I wanted to catalogue my “training” from being just a silly 18 year old girl who thought she knew it all to a grown up lady who could keep a house and work and parent and sew and bake and do all the things that a perfect lady could do. I wanted to prove to each and every single person who had ever wrote me off as a “daft wee lassie” that in actual fact, I was so much more than that.

Last week I wrote about making a gift for Findlay’s teacher and I also gave her a knitted bookmark like this one. I wrote a card thanking her for her work, added a quote that I liked and sent Findlay into school on the last day – not expecting to receive anything back. But I did.

I cried when I read this. I’m crying again now. I don’t doubt that Findlay’s teacher had a stack of cards to write out that day and that she perhaps didn’t necessarily plan out her thank you, but her words gave me validation and I finally feel that I’m not just a daft wee lassie anymore, I’ve graduated into the class of “doing not too bad actually”. And perhaps it’s time to rename my adventures and take the training wheels off.

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