She’s about eighteen months old in the picture, my Grandmother. Her grey-blue eyes – brown in the sepia tones of the picture – stare out at the world with neither wonder nor expectation, just taking for granted whatever should come her way.

This is a gift all children possess, in the beginning; no particular wants or needs other than those most immediate – food, warmth, sleep, and love. Our list of wants starts to eclipse our list of needs as we get older, but it wasn’t that way for my grandmother.

The first child of a sixteen year old girl, her arrival in the world wasn’t marked in any way – officially or unofficially – and when her mother finally married, her new status of stepdaughter proved just as inauspicious as that of no-name-child.

Her absence from family pictures in which her brothers and sisters smile nervously out at the viewer can be accounted for by four well chosen words:

‘She’s not my child.’

Despite the hours she spent combing and braiding hair, ensuring that her squirming little sisters were ready, she was denied her place among her siblings by virtue of the fact that she only shared a mother with them.

It was perhaps as a result of the acceptance she was denied that my grandmother’s wants in life were so simple – miniscule by modern standards; home, family, and health. 

Having grown up the only child of a divorcee in the seventies and eighties, I entered the adult world wanting all of these things and a whole lot more. Not for me, three kids, bacon and eggs once a week and a Housing Comission house; I wanted six kids, gourmet meals, and a two storey Edwardian.

Of course, I ended up with substantially less than that, (although one amazing kid is enough for me now), plus a train load of debt which I don’t see myself putting a dent in for at least another ten years, and whenever I catch myself bemoaning the quagmire into which I so willingly dove, I look into Grandmother’s eyes and wonder what she would make of me.

Not much, is my guess.