Grace

This  blog is special as my youngest daughter Grace happily accepted the invitation to say what she thought about me and my MSA. Here it is.

When my dad asked me to write this I felt a little unsure of what I could write and how eloquently I could express myself.  I thought about it and thought if it can help him then it will probably help me as well. I also could never say no to him!

I am currently living in NYC finishing my MA in Corporate Communications. This was something I committed to in late 2009 and was to a small extent a method of moving to be with my American boyfriend who I met in St Andrews. When the time came to make the move I was pretty uncertain and if it hadn’t been for a lot of my friends convincing me that, even though I loved my dad I couldn’t put my life on hold for him, I wouldn’t have gone. They also were probably right when they said he wouldn’t want me to anyway!

My friends have been a great support to me in terms of being an ear to listen to my concerns and feelings, but I wasn’t able to tell them, apart from the girls who lived with me at the time, about my dad’s disease for a full ten months. I wasn’t really ready to accept it and I guess that was reflected in my silence. I am not very good at expressing my emotions; in fact I am fantastic at bottling things up, this works to my detriment and my emotions usually surface in an unusual way. Reid sometimes gets screamed at for not cleaning when really it is a combination of homesickness and frustration.

My dad’s illness frustrates me because it just isn’t fair. It is not fair on him; a man who worked so hard his entire life does not get the active retirement he always wanted. It is not fair on my mum because she has to balance her worries about my dad’s safety with his need to be as active for as long as possible. In my case I don’t think it is fair that just when I really began to develop an adult relationship with my dad and really appreciate him as an equal, with similar interests, he is no longer able to share those interests with me. I am still working at getting over the unfairness of it all.

When I finish my MA I have a decision to make as to whether I move back to the UK or stay in the US. At the moment it is very much up in the air and I am leaving the decision to those who are willing to employ me. I just know that when the difficult times do come I don’t want to be thousands of miles away across the Atlantic and I would be willing to drop anything to be closer to family.

This probably hasn’t been a very cheery blog entry. What I can say is that Dad’s illness encourages me to have more fun, explore more places, take a few more risks, and care less about the opinions of others. It made me realise that you never know what is around the corner and that we should all try to live our lives to the fullest while we can.

Thank you for this, There is a lot we have never talked about so we have some catching up to do.