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What will you remember?

What will you remember? Will you remember story time. Cuddled up and funny voices. Will you remember sneaking into our bed and falling back to sleep. Will you remember singing songs when you were small. Doing all the actions? Will you remember me singing you to sleep whilst rubbing your back? Will you remember licking the bowl after baking. Dancing around the lounge. Will you remember walking home from school and talking about your day. Will you remember my smile at parents evenings, dance shows, the day you rode your bike? Will you remember being pushed high on the swings until you giggled? Will you remember nights when you were sick and we'd sleep on the sofa? Mummy holding you in hospital. Will you rather remember the times I shouted. The times I could do nothing but walk away. The times I joined in your chaos rather than calming it. Will you remember the times I missed. That I worked through your chicken pox. That I was in hospital for your 3rd operation? That you would wake up and find I'd been taken ill in the night. That I was short tempered and shouty and often too tired to play? Just now I imagine our lives as pre breakdown and post breakdown. Pre breakdown was the time of songs and baking. Of cuddles and dancing. Post is the tired, shouty, mean mummy. I worry that all the good which grew you into wonderful little beings will be forgotten because you were too small to remember. That your childhood memories won't stretch back that far. Back to when I was patient. Back to when I was quite a good parent. That instead you will remember just surviving. That misery becomes your normal as it did mine. That your memories will be overshadowed by negativity, squashing the good times so they are difficult to recall. Will you in a few years be reflecting on your childhood with a therapist? Describing an unhappy home. A mother whose mind was always somewhere else, or worse, cruel? I so want it to be different for you. I don't want post breakdown to fill your memories. I don't want you to have the pain I feel. I deserve it though. I have failed you. You don't deserve this though. You deserve happy memories that are recalled far easier than mine. A relationship with a warm and reliable mother. That this cycle may be broken.
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