I'm back....

Hello guys

First like to apologise for not being around for a while. Not that I was a prolific blogger but hey my absence was still noticed and I thank you for that. What have I been doing? Getting my daughter off the roof howling at the moon in tense anticipation for her GCSE results. We both wanted these. If you’re a single parent then you will understand what I mean, we both NEEDED them and because she is a very hard working, talented girl, she passed, mummy cried and we continue to move forward not backward or even standing still. And trust me coming from a Guyanese, Christian, Windrush household, forward movement is paramount, especially living in the UK.

My kid lives with her Grandparents and to cut that long story short it’s so she could have the best life and the same life I had as a child. Therefore avoiding my life of domestic violence, copious amounts of drink, homelessness. Shared households with Muslim men (not as fun as that sounds), box rooms with racist neighbours with a hammer as I remember smashing through my door. Bedsits and unavoidable drugs in the rave era (didn’t really have a drug problem just liked taking them). There is more to that story that reveals me to sound less selfish but I’m too happy to dredge up the weepy stuff now but if Thatchers government didn't decree that I had made myself homeless, which I didn't I had a baby for fuck sake, then cut my child support because I wouldn't tell them were my violent ex-partner was....hmm? Can't think why I didn't do that...if the bitch hadn't hated single parents so much, then it may have been a different story, such a different story for a decade of single parents. It was a key time of social change, people weren't getting married as much, single parents were on the rise and morals and values passed by our parents were challenged as religion became a ridiculous paradigm which stopped making any sense in our modern lives and was on it's way out. And who did she blame for this shift in social awareness and punish?....The women.

Never usually hang pictures of my daughter up. Aside from always living in transition, I always felt that I had failed her and that she would look back at me and I would feel guilty and tearful. It's her second week of A levels today, she tells me to stop saying sorry as I have nothing to be sorry about....we had such a great chat on the phone last night and then continued on MSN and I even put her to bed. (Sounds odd but we have our ritual)

I didn't sleep the night following her first day of Sixth Form I was so happy, excited, overwhelmed and breathing a sigh of relief. Looking back at the pictures of her and I living in that god awful damp ridden flat 17 years ago, then making the decision to give her up to my mum, is pain you will never understand unless you have been through it yourself. Comparing that anguish to the utopia I feel now, is simply amazing. She is making her own decisions about her love of music and the piano and is working to go on to University, I can't stop grinning. And as for me, I am getting ready to write my dissertation for my MSc and a proposal for my PhD sat at my office desk, in a wee detached cottage, on an upper middle class rural hill in Scotland. Marx would kill me but after a couple of glasses of Jura Whisky he would soon understand!

I need to buy more picture frames...I'm not afraid of her wee eyes looking back at me....I KNOW we're finally both smiling now and proving Thatcher wrong. Maybe she was an accidental feminist and thats why my story is ending in some success but personally I can't wait for the funeral.