Gosh being a blogger is a funny old thing. You stumble around in your pyjamas at the kitchen table loading photos and trying to find the right words to tell your stories in a way that makes them relateable and understandable. You share your heartaches, and your successes, and your hopes and dreams while the dishes lie soaking in the sink and the laundry waits to be hung out. It's all stolen moments and wondering if other people will find interest in the tales you're telling. It's all bursting to express yourself completely, while desperately trying to honour the pacts of privacy you've sworn to uphold.

And then occasionally a blog bursts forth from you and everything makes sense. It heals, it connects and it empowers.

I agonised for weeks over whether to write the words of my last post. I worried about breaking my daughter's trust, I thought about exposing myself to the world, I feared judgment, and in some strange way I didn't want to cause pain to the other party. But the sentences were screaming to be written. They'd go round and around in my head until I felt like I was going crazy.

So on one of the first days of our holiday I closed myself in my bedroom and wrote them down. My part of the story. My feelings and reactions and fears.

I contemplated leaving it in my drafts and hoped that the writing was enough, but it wasn't. That post wanted to be published.

Mostly in the minutes after I publish a blog nothing happens. I feel relieved and happy to have sent my story out into the world. I press the button, I close my computer and then I move onto something else.

This time it was like a volcano erupting. In the minutes after I posted, my daughter came and lay with me on my bed and I read it to her to make sure she felt like I'd been sensitive enough and that she felt safe. Then, before I'd even finished, my computer started binging with messages and comments and texts. Messages of support, messages filled with stories and messages of empathy. And a week later they still haven't stopped flowing in, spreading a thick layer of compassion and understanding and community.

I am gobsmacked (I've never used that term before but the visual feels so fitting) by how wide spread this issue is, and has been for a very long time. It kills me. I can only hope that all the cliches about time passing and difficult situations making better and stronger people are true.

I'm holding this passage from  Alice Miller's -  The Drama of the Gifted Child close to my heart;

It is not only the 'beautiful', 'good' and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage and grief. 

I'm so terribly sad and sorry for those of us who have been been treated badly and especially for those of us who have had to watch it happen to someone we adore. It's the worst. Worst! Worst! I'm sending love and strength and courage out to all.