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When my son was born, and after a day of lying-in I was told that I could leave the hospital and take him home, I burst into tears. It wasn't the emotion of the moment: it was shock and horror.

As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever.

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.

My father's death, my move, and my frightening and difficult delivery created a tremendous amount of stress, pain, and sadness for me. I was practically devastated beyond recovery.

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

When I had to bury my child, I probably didn't start grieving until a year and a half later.

For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the service of mental conceptions that resulted, almost as a by-product, sometimes in its pleasuring and sometimes in its abuse.

My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.