As I write t his letter, I am embarking on yet another diet. No-one knows. Just my husband and my mother. I’m ashamed you pointed at your own perfect body wrong. Someone had teased you Someone had made you feel imperfect.
I have been lying to you since you were born. As I write these letters, I’m still lying to you. As a new mother I lived my whole life with you in the audience – nothing was off limits. I sat on the toilet with you suckling at my breast, I vomited with your toddler hand gripping my back, I changed my tampon in cramped shopping-centre toilet stalls while you watched from close quarters. Does this disgust you? It shouldn’t. It didn’t then.
Being a mother of a very young child is to become completely exposed, because there is nowhere else for you (or them) to go. A child’s all-seeingness removes any room for vanity, decorum or modesty.
Yet putting the brutal intimacy of bodily fluids aside, in those early days it was easy to deceive you.
Now, you are older. We rarely share a bathroom stall. But you see more, and you hear everything. Your eyes narrow and lips purse, and
