When is the beginning? Conception, birth or now?

We all begin at a point in time. My beginning and birth is on the 27th of November 1996. I was born 13 weeks premature via a C-section. I often wonder why I was born early. Many believed that I would be deformed, ill and weak. But I was neither, I was born healthy. Small but otherwise “normal.”

I was born so small that I fit into my fathers hand, with my legs dangling from either side of his palm. Outside of my small incubator my mother worried and fretted over me. She believed that I would die, as her previous daughter did.

After many weeks I was cleared to go home and so my parents scooped me up and took me to the home that I would know for the first three years of my life.

Here I met my older brothers, Ciar who was 10 and Bjorn who was 6.

I remember many things about this home. I remember the heat of the fire as I cuddled in front of it and ate marmite and cheese toasties. The long winding tracks that lead into the bush, the smell of the dog and freshly painted walls. Even though I only lived their for the first three years of my life I could still tell you the exact layout of that house.

I can also tell you many other things that I remember. For instance the time that I was first sexually abused. The sound of my uncle beating my mother. Or the actions of a mother paranoid that her daughter would die.

I am here to tell you all of these things because they are my truth and this is my beginning.