Knowledge can arrive at the wrong time because the people you needed to hear it from are no longer there.
And there is nowhere to take that knowledge.
Not knowing meant dealing with lies, deceit and the absence of trust that came with it over decades, and they left without putting it right.
They know.
It's a lot to absorb.
I know more about myself now than I did growing up. Autism has given me a different vocabulary for parts of my life, while cerebral palsy was always there, already known about, already part of the decisions being made around me.
What I have now is hindsight.
And hindsight doesn't help when there is nobody left to ask. In my gut, I understand all of this in context – more than I ever could as a child.
I can recognise things about my circumstances that I wasn't given the understanding to recognise back then. All of it is true.
It hasn't changed my story; it has helped me understand it.
That explains what I do now through The CP Diary: I give words to what I didn't know about.
What I cannot do is take all of this understanding back into the room.
And I cannot physically, earth side, ask my parents why?
I cannot also physically hear their answers.
If we all had our time again, I know my parents. Nothing would have changed earth side.
I am surprised I am still here. It has been a lot to deal with, to absorb. I am mentally tired, exhausted in fact.
Looking back, I can see that my twin and I grew up in something of a goldfish bowl, with helicopter parenting that meant our lives were watched, managed and decided around us.
There wasn't the space for us to emotionally and spiritually grow, to understand ourselves. That is part of why the understanding I have now carries too much weight. The other part is the disability I didn't know about. My anonymity.
It's been decades. And I am still working through what it means for my anonymity and my mental health.
But I keep coming back to hope. I held on so tight.
Hope is not something I thought I would have to work so diligently at. In some ways, it is something that should have been afforded to me.
That would not necessarily have changed what I came to know, including things I might rather not have known or had to work through. But love, support and care might have changed what it was like to carry that knowledge.
I don't know whether this way is better – working it all out is asking too much of me.
As I continue to unravel more pieces of my life, I have come to understand that my mum, through work on herself in spirit, is sorry – contrite – and that my father is moving towards the same understanding.
It doesn't give me the physical conversations that are no longer possible. Nor does it change what happened, or provide physical answers where there can no longer be any.
But it does mean that, as I continue to write, and make sense of what happened and what it means for me, I am no longer entirely without support.
