After my husband and I separated, there was a moment when he tried to pull me back into his life. I was in a bad place emotionally, not thinking clearly, and certainly not thinking about my son the way I should have been.
I returned to Manchester later. I took the train up to Manchester to see him, and before I even reached him, some of his friends spotted me. They gave me a real scare — a reminder that I wasn’t moving through life as invisibly as I thought.
I did try to get back with him. We spent the night squeezed into his single bed, and even in that moment, I remember asking him, “What about Shaun?” It was a question that hung in the air, unanswered, because neither of us really knew what we were doing.
When I was pregnant, I had been the healthiest I’d ever been. I can still picture myself walking from our house down to the beach, glowing, genuinely happy to be carrying my baby. It felt like a new beginning after so much chaos. I’d already been through a miscarriage at seventeen — His eldest sister told me it wasn’t the right time, and maybe she was right. I had just come out of care when I met him, still trying to figure out who I was.
I remember leaving my mum’s house to move in with him. She warned him, “She’s not easy to live with.” After all my running away and teenage behaviour, I thought it was funny at the time. Looking back, I can see the layers of truth in her words — not as criticism, but as a mother who had already watched me survive more than most teenagers should.
My fiance and I lived in Ilfracombe first, in a flat perched on a huge steep hill. I remember every inch of that place. Later we moved to Combe Martin, where I stayed up all night putting chipwood wallpaper on the walls and painting them bright green. I was trying to make a home, even if I didn’t know how.
Our neighbours once told us that breeding puppies was harder work than raising a child. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that — I was already learning that motherhood was nothing like anyone prepared you for.
My mum adored my son. Every Sunday we’d go to her house. I did love her, but our relationship was complicated, shaped by grief neither of us had processed.
I was eventually converted me to being one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The promise of seeing my dad again in the “new system” hooked me in completely. I still hadn’t dealt with losing him. I was carrying that wound everywhere I went.
Those years were messy, hopeful, painful, and full of moments I’m still trying to understand. But they were mine — the beginning of my life as a mother, and the beginning of learning who I really was beneath all the survival.
For a while, I tried to make the Jehovah’s Witnesses my spiritual home. I’d been drawn in when I was young and grieving, looking for answers and a sense of belonging. But the reality was far more rigid than I could live with.
I was disfellowshipped in my early twenties for something as small as smoking cigarettes — a rule so strict it required two witnesses to “prove” it. Years later I went back out of curiosity, wondering if it might feel different with time, but the atmosphere was still the same: square, controlled, and suffocating.
I realised I’d outgrown it. Whatever I needed back then, I no longer needed now. Walking away wasn’t rebellion; it was simply choosing a life that allowed me to breathe.