Ex-boyfriend

My ex-boyfriend and I first met about three years ago. We've been on trips together to Melbourne, south-western Australia, Newcastle, NSW. We camped at Philip Island, not far from Melbourne, Victoria for the motorcycle grandprix weekend. He is going there this year with my girlfriend, straight from Italy.

The three years have been stormy and we've been broken up a lot of that time. I see the problem as his desire to conquer me. I haven't been able to give in and he has become impatient and brought in dirty tactics like 'I need counselling' because of my severe problems with 'lack of trust'. He is worst when I catch him out in a lie. He will go all out to discredit and destroy my credibility in my own as well as other peoples eyes.

On our trip to Newcastle, we attended a wedding. We arrived at my Mother's house; her deceased boyfriend's house that she would have to give up to his daughter when she moved into a home, and that has actually happened now; and she wobbled up to him with her eyes intent on giving him a great big open kiss on the mouth. She had to reach up to do it, all wrinkles and floralled, shiney materialled shift and no bra to keep those long boobs up from her waist.

He met my brother, a bearded bushman with a gift for music and other relatives who prefer to make music than talk or be inquisitive about others. We arrived and immediately became an audience for all of them. I had hoped my ex-boyfriend might be able to understand me if he saw where I came from, after all I had told him about my journey through psychotherapy. He really didn't know what to make of the whole experience.

Now that he is with my girlfriend, he has heard the story I told her to explain myself. This is the story about attending a good private school in Melbourne, my father being part owner in a family factory, maintaining and fixing the machinery in it because he was trained as a mechanical engineer. We were rich, in other words. We lived in a big house in the Dandenong Ranges; a house that he gave away rather than leave for his children. That much is true.

I created a poster years back and a girlfriend saw it and said it was very sad. The poster depicted a young girl and a mother. The mother had been hit by a car. She spent years in a hospital bed, we can tell this by the height of the girl at the hospital bed and that she has grown a lot as she leans over her Mothers' coffin with a flower. The words on the poster are - mother died slowly - drop 5 save lives. The poster was for a road safety competition. It wasn't chosen. It didn't win anything. But the idea was planted in my girlfriend's mind that this was my mother I had depicted in the poster.

Now I do believe that my ex-boyfriend knows of this and is waiting for me to explain my history. His last strategy when he wanted to attack me was that because of my upbringing I really need to get some counselling. I had the feeling it was the Melbourne story and the poster story he was referring to. He attacks me because he feels there is nothing wrong with him, it all has to do with me.

The thing is, I believe that he is convinced of the new story he has heard. The mother that he met in Newcastle just can't be my mother. It just doesn't fit. Not only that, but in Newcastle other friends of mine and my brothers were there like they were part of the family too, like Mum was a 'carer' of many. Also, at the wedding, when I was next up to make a speech, my brother objected, as if I wasn't part of the family, therefore not really entitled. Yet one of our friends made a speech. I'm used to not being understood and regarded with suspicion by my family since the psychotherapy.

Now, it all has just fuelled by ex-boyfriends suspicions that something bad happened in my childhood and its too painful to talk about. When we were away on Saturday afternoon until Sunday early afternoon, I tried to tell him something that would make him happy, like I'm confiding in him. So I went over the story that I guessed he already knew. Melbourne, the poster, explaining that someone took that poster wrongly. I didn't elaborate. He walked away, silently, impatiently. He wants to understand me.

I don't want to lose him, stupid as that sounds. I need to tell him what he wants to hear.

Perhaps I can explain that my mother was run over. I was six or seven. We visited her in hospital, a hospice, then she died. This was our ritual, every Sunday, visit Mummy. But where? I don't have a name of the hostel in Melbourne offhand.

In the meantime Daddy gets a housekeeper. The house is big. She takes the downstairs flat. She has two sons. One of them I became close to - Stephen. She is still in close contact with the children of another family she used to look after. She also has an older son who lives with his father. Infact maybe these two sons also live with their father a lot of the time. She becomes my 'Mum'.

I spend most of my time with them when Im not travelling to and from school. Daddy works long hours and he's met someone else. He doesn't bring her to the house. She has children of her own; maybe she's married, even. I grow up, move into the nurses quarters and seldom go home to stay in the downstairs flat because 'Mum' has moved on, and Dad's new family now live upstairs. They get his house. I' m left nothing when he dies much, much later.

Does that sound convincing? I'm not sure.

The thing is, I could stick to my story. Yes. That is my real mother in Newcastle. That is my real family. I broke free and became a different person after psychotherapy.

He will look at me and he won't believe it. He'll think I don't trust him with my most agonising, heart-breaking secrets.

Another thing, if I'm not believed when I say that I grew up with poverty and abuse, but I am believed when I say I'm a poor little rich girl struck down by tragedy, I may as well go with the rich story.

The person I am now and that girl I was, are so different I can hardly understand myself, so how can I expect anyone else to understand?

Lonely, isolated and happy to be that way most of the time....