A child becoming a young woman

I’ve always known I was different from those that were around me from a young age.

I was born into a family that was already a little “more” than your average.

My mum was 12 years older than my Dad. She had two children from a previous marriage who were 12 and 10 years of age when I was born and my dad was brought up in a very strong willed Italian family.

You could imagine the type of talk that happened in those days, my Nonna was devastated. This older woman marrying her youngest child.

At the time, it was something that could not be accepted.

But my parents persisted and they got married.

When I was born, I have this feeling that I maybe I brought the families together (or I like to think that I did) That’s what a newborn child tends to do, it brings out the warmer side of people.

I can’t recall a time that I felt I wasn’t loved by my dad or my dad’s side of the family, I always felt that I belonged no matter the circumstance and that has been felt right through to my adulthood.

Starting from the the age of 3, life gave me its first experience into relationship turmoil.

My parents divorced. Me and my mum went to Malta and stayed with my grandparents for a few months, the purpose I guess was for mum to recover from the heartache.

She never really did recover, because she loved my dad with all that she had.

But before long, My parents got back together and my mum soon discovered she had a brain tumour the size of a mandarin growing inside her head.

I was 5 years old at the time. I had just started primary school, and I was still trying to understand what was happening to my parents, let alone thinking my mother could possibly die.

But my mother did recover and successfully had the tumour removed.

In those years of recovery, my parents really tried to give me the best life they could.

I loved to dance & perform so my mum put me into a dancing school near home and I really excelled in class.

Dancing gave me a lease on life and I could be my complete self. It was something just for me, that I could turn to.

As the years went on, I was growing up and starting to understand a lot more that went on around me. My parents, in a desperate attempt to make things right, eloped in Hawaii. That was the year 2000.

In 2001, my mum became ill again, it felt like it was overnight. Her spleen enlarged to the size of a football.

She had it removed but not long after, the doctors discovered something more sinister and that my mother had developed cancer. A bone marrow cancer seperate from leukemia but a cancer that was similar and at the time only 50 people in the world had this type.

Again my world started to change, I was developing into a young woman, starting my puberty years, I stopped dancing because it was a strain on my mums health and something we could no longer commit to due to her hospital schedules and emergency run ins.

I started high school with the world on my shoulders. My father came to a point that he could no longer cope with my mums illness and the stress and thought it was best to leave. So he did.

To say my start to high school was tough, would be an understatement. I was bullied from the beginning and had rumours spread around like wild fire, but one day I had enough, I snapped back and started to stand up for myself and the feelings I felt on the inside became a hard exterior on the outside and people started to back off.

I had to stand up for myself, because my world at home was destroyed and I had to survive through these years at high school and it was an absolute challenge. But something I accepted.

I felt I was completely misunderstood by so many of my peers but had a selected few that stood by my side after knowing who I truly was and what I was going through.

Me and my dad rarely spoke or saw each other through these times and he found someone new along the way.

I was angry at him for a long time, no fault of my mums. She would encourage me to see him but I was hurting too gravely and too young to understand his perception on things.

As the years went on, my mum went into remission a few times and we moved houses a lot because she couldn’t afford the rentals on her own. Life was tough.

But my mum always supported and gave me optimism that things would work itself out and she taught me to remain strong and to understand that life changes and the best you can do is to remain resilient in those times. And that’s what I did.

After my 18th birthday in 2007, my mums health declined.

She could no longer continue the cancerous battle and gave her last breath January 14th 2008.

Mums passing in the end was expected but how I was going to live my life without her was another story.

My life from then changed forever and will be continued in my next piece.