What goes around

In the end, the return home to care for my parents had a bittersweet taste of life going full circle – caring for them in ways that they would have cared for me, seeing them out of this world after they had seen me in. Even now, life continues to surprise and astound with its weird and wonderful ways. On what would have been dad’s birthday, I spoke with  an agent who  wanted to  publish the  diary I kept at that time as a book. Then, as the ink dried on the contract, my husband and I found out that I was expecting our  first child. In February, I was in  a recording studio in Clerkenwell reading (actually choking on) my own words for the audiobook as our energetic unborn son did little flips inside my tummy. Being cared for and caring now had  a third dimension.

Of course, this brings new waves of feelings. I don’t want to term them as grief but I suppose you might. I am sad that my parents never got to become grandparents. I am sad that I never got to ‘get’ that element when you fully understand what your parents went through raising you. The empathy you feel after sleepless nights with newborns and call your mum half-crying to say, “I’m sorry I put you through this”.

Then there are the questions  I cannot get answers to. Did mum have morning sickness? Was I an easy birth? A difficult baby? I don’t know, so I make up the answers.  I am also sorry that my children will never have them as grandparents, that’s so crap. They will have wonderful grandparents in the shape of my in-laws, who are giddily waiting on the sidelines for their grandson to arrive, but they won’t know my parents, they will only have tattered old photos and nostalgic stories. They will never know the touch of their hands or their smell. When grappling with motherhood I will never have my mum and dad say to me with a semi-vengeful joy, “Oh it’s OK, you were way worse than this!” I will never be able to embrace that side of the relationship with my parents where you fully understand how much they gave for you  to have life. So  I find different things upsetting now. Everything takes on a different shade of sadness and nostalgia.

At some point this summer, our son will enter the world, ironically a street away from where my mum and dad met and then lived together, in Chelsea. His first screams will be within distance of their old front door. I feel that in some way they will be there, my mum and dad. The in-laws will be hurtling down the motorway to be there and my brother and his family are eagerly awaiting the new addition too. So, you see our son already has an army of carers who will, in turn, show him what it is to love and to care.

My Mad Dad: The Diary Of An Unravelling Mind by Robyn Hollingworth (£16.99, Trapeze) is out on 19 April.

“I was just 25 when my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s”