It must be nice to have a really good relationship with your parents, all you lucky people. Mine weren't bad parents but I never liked my father and had no respect for my mother. In fact they were a completely mismatched couple. Or perhaps they weren't - my father was king of the castle and my mother knew her place.
The main things I can remember my father telling me from when I was a girl were that I was cynical and had 'an unpleasant disposition'. I didn't know what cynical meant and I didn't know what disposition meant but I understood unpleasant well enough. Funnily enough, it never occurred to him to ask himself why a child might exhibit those traits. Might it have anything to do with such things as promising that child a bike if she passed her 11-plus and then, when she did, telling her that as the premises of her new school had moved to a mile away from where she lived she no longer needed one?
My mother, bless her cotton socks, was as thick as two short planks, not to put too fine a point on it. She once said something to me that literally made my jaw drop. She'd been slagging off my brother's wife and I dared to try and defend her in her absence. My mother said to me, "That's the trouble with you. You're always looking for the good in people." Surely something that most mothers would treasure in their offspring!
She has Alzheimer's now. Although she's still alive, she's long since gone. I suppose the only saving grace was that not being too intelligent, she didn't realize that the small things, such as putting her purse in the washing machine and swearing that someone had nicked it, were precursors of what is a truly horrible disease.
