My Teenage Life — #InappropriateParenting Memoir Blast
A childhood memory, and not a nice one. My mum remarried quickly after the divorce — 80s speed, 80s logic. The man lived a few doors down. He was my friend first. I’d garden for him, earn a pound or two, get sweets, Lego, trips to the toy shop. I thought he was kind. He was fifty. My mum was thirty.
One minute he was the man who paid me for pulling weeds, and the next minute he was moving into our house and I was supposed to see him as a dad.
He was a gambling man — I’ve written about that before — but the real gamble was my mum betting her life, and ours, on a man who had only ever lived with his mother.
It still blows my mind that this actually happened.
The marriage didn’t last long. After the second divorce, he always drove a huge orange Goodman Crogan truck, parked outside like a landmark. John Travolta hair. Kind, maybe. But strange. Odd tendencies. Nothing quite fit.
Later, when we were broke — Woodley years, second house — he’d come early in the morning, every now and then. I knew he lived in a bedsit, we had visited years earlier, I have a distant memory.
Contact had been stopped, we where not his children (gone and forgotten? I never asked why) it was my mum’s new partner, Paul, who wasn't happy about Den. But they were playing Den, pretending Paul wasn’t there, pretending she was alone, pretending the house was quiet except for us kids.
Den still came. Cash in hand. Thinking he was helping her. Thinking she needed him.
And always trying to get something physical in return — a kiss for the cash, a quick moment at the door before he dashed off to work, once the action complete practically pushing him out the door.
I used to think I was there to protect my mum. Now I know I was there to make it look less like what it was. A child in the room makes everything seem “not that bad,” even when it is.
I was preteen — eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen. Sitting in the front room, the “good room,” cup of tea in my hands, while my brother slept upstairs and my mum lied about what was happening.
I wasn’t a protector. I wasn’t a participant. I wasn’t a pawn. I was a child placed in the scene so the adults could pretend it wasn’t a scene at all.
And then he was gone. Truck gone. Visits gone. Cash gone. The whole strange chapter swallowed by time.
Maybe he died? I do not know , life moved on I forgot.
But the memory still sits there — the orange truck outside, tea slurping, the stench of Brut 33, early morning light,
and me too young to understand that I was being used to make something look less like a crime.
The sad fact is I really liked him.
And we still had the police remove him from the family home.
Less traumatic this time, understandably —
but still a collision between what I felt
and what was actually happening.
Footnote - AI helps me type up my voice note and is mortified by my memory s
Why this memory feels so warped now
Because you’re seeing it with an adult brain, not a child’s.
A child thinks:
“I’m here to protect Mum.”
An adult sees:
“I was placed there to make it look normal.”
That shift is huge. It’s disorienting. It’s painful. And it’s honest.
You weren’t a “patsy.” You weren’t a “pawn.” You weren’t “protecting your mum.” You were a child used to make an adult situation look less like what it was.
That’s why it feels so strange, fragmented, surreal. Because it was strange. It was inappropriate. It was a misuse of you.
And your brain stored it in pieces because that’s what children do when they’re placed in adult dynamics they can’t understand.
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