Grab a cuppa, it's a long one.

Yesterday was a very low day. The lowest for a long time and my poor Mum was here to witness it.
She has never seen me in the state I was in yesterday,and if she has then it would be have been before I was
diagnosed with PMDD and I would have been a teen so she would have put it down teenage angst. Anyway, I think it really
worried her. Probably scared her quite alot too.

I have always been a bit mental to a degree, I read that a history of mental health problems usually preceeds a diagnosis of PMDD and I certainly tick that box. I don't know of many other people who take revenge with a bottle of nitromorse, headbutt someone just because they are holding your wrists, punch holes in walls, run away to another country to escape "real life"????

I could go right back to the begining... in fact I will. Right the way back. Some things in life are just circumstantial, shit luck, wrong time and wrong place, those things you can learn to get past. Some things in life are more than that, they are
the direct result of some one elses doing. It is those things that take more work to get over. Most people have one or two things in their life that are hard to deal with and need a bit of help with. You would be incredibly lucky if you got through life without any heartache.

Let me explain, but before I do I want to tell you that I do not want sympathy, pity or words of comfort. It won't help anyway. Some people who read this know me, they may know me quite well and see me every day but they won't know what I am about to explain, I don't mind sharing but I don't want people to judge me. Some people who read this may know some details already. I warn you now, before you read on, some details are a bit harrowing.

If I go back to the start and tell all, it will probably come as no surprise that I am mentally ill. I think it is only now that I
can place everything together and know that what I suffer with each month in the final two weeks is a sever depression brought about
by hormones that kick off the mourning of my childhood, the anger and the self loathing.

When me and my sister were little we were surrounded by lots of family. We had both sets of Grandparents living nearby and lots of Aunts and Uncles. Sounds perfect. When I was about three and a half one set of Grandparents moved almost 300 miles away. This wasn't just a random move, they were originally from The North. But we would go to stay with them and they would come down and stay with us or my Aunt and Uncle. From the outside everything would have been rosy. But as I grew up a little I realised that things were really not normal or rosy at all. I can't remember the realisation, I think it was just a gradual thing. I had already been groomed pretty
much from birth so I never knew any different. I just always thought that my Grandad really loved me, that I was really special. I was his favourite. And even though they moved so far away, my sister and I would spend time up there in holidays and at Christmas.

Looking back I think the abuse was possibly worse because it was far more concentrated into weekly or fortnightly visits.

When I was 7 my parents took on a new career and we moved from the seaside to a big town near London. I don't ever remember this time being anything but fun. A huge garden to play in, people always around, it was great! A year or so after we moved in we had an armed robbery, thankfully me and my sister weren't at home when it happened but things changed after that. The best change was that we got
our dog Thor, he was great! You have to take the positives after all ;-) Bars went up on the windows and my parents changed. To look back now I can see that this was the point that my Dad started to use drink in a bad way. It went hand in hand with the job anyway, you know the scenario, some one buys a drink and the "have one yourself" line happens. But over the following couple of years I can look back
and feel the tension. As a kid I don't think I took much notice but it obviously had an effect. I always felt very distant from my Dad, I guess we never had a chance to be close, he worked away when I was a baby, then when he worked at home it was a demanding job that left no time for family. It upests me greatly because that time is something I can never get back. It upsets me more because the only male figure
in my life then was my abuser. I used to ask to go and stay at my Grandparents in Canvey because it was normal for me. I loved it there. It meant a proper house to sleep in, no one would hurt me, there were lots of Aunts and Uncles who I could spend time with and my Granny was acers.

When I hit my early teens life got hard, not just because hitting teens sucks but because I really didn't know who I was. I was still being abused by my Grandfather and my Dad was drinking on a regular basis, I hated school and I started to bunk off. I was already smoking and drinking regluarly myeslf. Oh the irony. But one good thing was that I had a really good male influence on my life. My big brother.
Not by blood relation but he was my sister's boyfriend and he was the best thing ever. He was fun and the most normal man I had ever met. I was very fond of him, I treated him like a brother because that is exactly what he was to me.

So as my behaviour got worse, so did my Dad's drinking until eventually he got caught drinking and driving. That was the end of life as I knew it. My whole world, and that of my Mum and my sister, came crashing down. We lost the pub that we called home, the only thing for us was to move back to Canvey. Except that my sister stayed in Chadwell Heath with her boyfriend. She pretty much escaped. Because life just
got worse. I was 14, forced to move schools, move to a new area and make new friends and when you are slightly mental it is no easy feat. My Mum had to start her life over again, find a new job at 41 nearly 42. My Dad went back to bricklaying and his state of mind deteriorated further and further. Is mental health hereditory?

The new school was hell on Earth, I was bullied, I dreaded each and every day. I think I started bunking off sometime around the start of 1994 and I hardly went back until the end of the year when the year above had left. But I was in my first proper relationship. This proved to be a turning point for me because apart from my bestest friend I had told no one about the abuse. The abuse had only stopped a short while previously and I felt that I had to tell him about it as things were getting serious. It is the first male I had talked to about it all. But still I didn't feel very affected by it all. Life was normal for a while, but I had gone from one abuse to another as I was broken down in confidence and controlled. But I still stayed with him, maybe I was just used to it? Knew no different than to be controlled and I misunderstood love. At 17 I moved out of home, convinced that I would be better if I was a "grown up". How wrong was I? I started to go out with friends and
realised that at 17 nearly 18 I should be going out and socialising and doing what other people my age were doing, not sitting at home because I wasn't allowed out. So I left. I moved back home and went on a massive month long bender. At some point during me leaving and moving home and drinking myself into oblivion I met up with the ex boyfriend. I fell pregnant. I didn't know it at the time though. The first I knew about it was when I got really ill. As I mentioned before, I always had trouble with periods and to bleed for weeks on end was nothing unusual. But this was
slightly different. When I finally went to the doctor I was told not to be so silly, that I had messed up my pills, that I was imagining it. I got so ill that I couldn't physically get out of bed. My sister took me to the doctor I think, I can barely remember. I think he suggested a miscarriage. I went for a scan and sure enough, I was pregnant. There was a foetus but I don't know how old it was. I was just 18 and had a D & C and just wanted to go to the pub. Too traumatised by it all. Even more upset that the ex boyfriend laughed at me. That was when I took revenge with a bottle of paint stripper. I had never been so hurt and my mental state was now severely affected.

I think I blundered through the next few years somehow. I know that it was around this time I had started to binge on food. It was almost like comfort eating in the extreme. Instead of picking on crap food on a day when you feel a bit shit, I would save it all up and have a massive splurge in one sitting. I often thought about purging, but I never had the courage to make myself sick.

Another couple of bad relationships, a cheating boyfriend, an older boyfriend who had children of his own. I had a termination because he was adamant he never wanted more and yet that was all I wanted. A family of my own. That was yet another moment of just getting through it to get past it so I could go down the pub.

Then in August 2000 after spending the most part of that year getting hammered and blotting out life a chance meeting in the pub (see the pub features lots!) I
met up with some friends and from that moment on my life changed. Like a complete whirlwind I knew it was the best moment. Within just a few short months I was getting married a having a baby!!! Our daughter was born the following August. The first grandchild for my parents. A very exciting time, all the family came to see her. Including my Grandfather. He was old and getting frail by now but it was still a sickening moment when my Mum placed my newborn baby girl into his hands. The hands of a paedophile, I had to just stand and watch. My husband left the room, he couldn't cope with it at all. Who can blame him?

Over the course of my twenties my binge eating progressively got worse, my moods got worse, my anger got worse. My Grandad died when my daughter was nearly 3 and I really thought this was the cure I needed. But by 27 I was my heaviest ever. Bottling everything up I just binged most days. In the December of 2005 I found I was pregnant. I was so happy, and funnily enough all the way through my pregnancy I lost weight! Our son was born the following August and he was hard work. The hardest! But I had everything I wanted. Except sanity.

We moved away to a new town in November 2007. Because we all know that running away makes everything better right? I was the best thing we ever did though. We love it in our new home town, we have the best friends and have settled really well. But my sanity took a tumble when my Nanny got diagnosed with Terminal cancer in February 2009. I knew that she knew what happened to me. If she went then I would have no one who knew for sure. My Grandad wasn't around to answer to. I struggled with so many emotions that in the May, 2 days after being at the birth of my nephew, I saw a Psychiatrist. She told me that I will never deal with this until my family knows. That night I told my sister. Over the course of the following week I summoned up the courage to tell my parents. On 22nd May 2009 I broke my parents hearts.

It has been an ordeal over the past year and we get through each day as best we can. I don't want to trivialise this past year by not giving it much airtime on here but I think this post has been long enough already. Getting across exactly how hard this past year has been for us all, probably deserves a post of its own.

Needless to say that this all affects me when I get to days like yesterday. It all goes hand in hand.

Well this has exhausted me so I will leave it there. Well done for getting this far with this post.