Who is the Bitch?

by Karen J Mossman

Yes, that really is the title of my post, and for a reason. I didn’t know what that meant or why.

Let me explain. I keep a diary and have done for many years. I’m on my fourth five-year diary now. The first yearly diary I was given in 1972, I just wrote whose birthday it was and occasionally that we went out somewhere. I was fourteen.

My Nana gave me this. Nana was a lovely lady but always a little eccentric. She often did odd things, and Mum told me that Nana’s mother was just the same. Nana got worse as she got older with many peculiar incidents. In her seventies, she began to show signs of dementia. By her eighties, she was just a shell.

In the diary, there was one entry, just one. At first I thought it was something she had written for herself before deciding to give it to me. Years later I realised she had written it for me, as if to tell me something.

Aunty Bitch Rutter’s birthday, send 1 oz of poison. If she had written it for herself, she wouldn’t have put aunty. She never referred to it, either.

Aunty Kath was Nana’s sister.  I remembered going to her house, then we stopped going. That’s because she and Nana fell out. They didn’t talk again for seventeen years. When they did, I was grown up. She was lovely, as was her husband. She was kind and so like Nana in looks and ways it often made me laugh. I was very sad about all the years we’d lost. I’ve no idea what could have been so bad as to fall out for that long.

Families can be funny things, and have strange dynamics that sometimes makes it difficult. Maybe it runs in the family because in 2010, I fell out with my brother and we have never spoken since. It’s sad because I don’t think there is any going back.

Has there been something like this in your family? Did it every get resolved?