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My mother was my father's third wife. His first died of kidney failure a year after marrying. His second, by whom he had two sons, committed suicide during a severe and prolonged post-natal depression. To his third marriage then, he brought two young, deeply bereaved children and what we would now describe as an enormous burden of emotional baggage.

My parents' expectations were doubtless in conflict from the outset. While my mother sought a lover, mate and her own children, my father - no matter how much love and desire entered the equation - was more in need of a housekeeper and nanny. Had they given themselves sufficient time to gel into a unit, things may have been different but, within a year, my brother was born - my mother's first child and therefore, her natural priority. Her two stepsons fast sank down her agenda and the family began to split along its ready-made fault lines. My arrival four years later merely deepened the rift.


My mother would have needed to be a saint to disobey the biological imperative to favour her own offspring. That favouritism was ever unequal, though: my brother was always the apple of her eye yet, perversely, she often criticised my father for not giving me, as his single daughter, special attention.

While always aware of our differences, we children still functioned as an integrated group: hostilities generally erupted only between my brother and myself. In truth, I preferred my half-brothers' company. They never competed with me, despite a wholly reasonable anxiety about my threatening their share of finite emotional and material resources.

They were also gentler souls than my brother and I, the younger one especially, whom I could not have loved more had we been full-blood siblings. Weeks before he was to begin grammar school, he died in a road accident. My father, utterly devastated, must have believed himself cursed. We children were distraught. What did my mother feel? Grief, certainly, but not the coruscating anguish that, in particular, struck my father and half-brother. Her quite understandable inability to share that anguish, to make the necessary allowances, only made matters worse.

When my parents finally split, my half-brother left with my father. So, my brother and I sustained a double loss, to which my mother, wrapped in her own misery, could give little account. Battle commenced over property, custody and access, leading us all into court, where my brother and I were forced to choose, so it seemed, between our parents. Of course, my mother won, but did she ever realise, I wonder, that it was, for her children, a Pyrrhic victory? Even if my father did not feel repudiated by our loyalty to her, he nonetheless became alienated.


Subsequently, my mother devoted herself to us and, although over time two especially nice men were very smitten with her, she kept her distance: once bitten, twice shy, perhaps. Or maybe, she feared taking a tumble off the moral high ground, as she reckoned my father had by embarking on a relationship with another woman.

Terrified that this woman might gain a hold on our affections should we ever meet, my mother set about demonising both her and my father and, so powerful and enduring was her antipathy that we did not re-establish proper contact with our father until after she died.

My half-brother's death notwithstanding, my parents' marriage was probably doomed not least because stepfamilies can come with inbuilt self-destruct mechanisms. The adults, in seeking to meet their own needs for love, sex, companionship and support, force on children situations which ignore their own bereavement, bewilderment, fear of the unknown and inevitable resentment towards the cuckoos in their nest: the new partner and stepsiblings.

Despite the misery and crises, my parents never imagined that they or us might need professional help and, although our custody went before the courts, none was ever offered. Marital breakdown, however acrimonious, is not generally viewed as hazardous, yet the dangers are very real and often enduring, particularly for children. The search for a new mate and father-figure can push abandoned mothers into serial relationships with men who, wanting something entirely different, at best see the children as an encumbrance and, at worst, a real threat to themselves and own potential offspring, as child injury and death statistics demonstrate.

Alison Taylor is a novelist and senior child care worker