To my mum, for never being able to live up to what she would have liked me to be. She always wanted me to be a little princess and I was never going to be that.
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 December 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 209 →Dozens of women – I think you’ll figure out why.
Both parents, I’ll write the book someday.
Anyone I slept with before the age of 27, because I was a selfish, cold-ass bitch.
More from Denise Welch
View profile →Now, because of my marriage and because since September 2019 I’ve been free of clinical depression.
My husband, Lincoln, for getting sober with me. He turned his own life around to turn mine around. We didn’t do AA, we anchored each other.
Stopping being such a helicopter parent and worrying about these grownup children’s lives. It drives me mad. And I am having therapy. If I could stop thinking that I should be their first port of call for everything, it would free my head up a bit.
Shitting myself in New York last November. I was wearing cream trousers. We were going to see my son Matty and his band, the 1975, at Madison Square Garden, and I was walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, pretending I was in some kind of video – throwing my hat into the New York sky like Mary Tyler Moore. I saw a couple of people turn and look at me. Now, although I’m not famous in New York, whenever Matty’s there I do get recognised as his mum, so I’m smiling and waving at them. I went back to the hotel room and bent over to get something out of the suitcase, and my husband said: “Do you realise you’ve shat yourself?”
I was a waitress at a holiday camp. On a Wednesday afternoon all the guys used to pee into the rice pudding and we had to serve it to the customers.
Oversensitivity.
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