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www.shiloh.com.au—An open letter to my mother,

19th September.

Dear Mum,

I’ve done as much of your bucket list as I could. I’ve skidded down a hillside clinging to a sure-footed stock-horse, I’ve trembled with exhilaration atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge and I’ve thrown myself offa perfectly sound one in New Zealand. I’ve felt his music as Beethoven must have, and the extraordinary mercury-leather brush of dolphin skin against my body. I’ve dropped down the side of a building and floated high above the world. I’ve been marched across by penguins as I lay enraptured on an ice-sheet and moved to tears by a touch more reverent and gentle than I had ever imagined could exist.

I couldn’t do everything on your list, but perhaps that was always the point. That life fully realised is something you strive for but should never attain. Because once you tick off that final box, what is left to do, then, but wait for your allotted heartbeats to run out?

Somewhere in my childhood I learned that love is earned, not bestowed, and believing myself unworthy of it—yours, my father’s, even my own—has shaped my life. But it has made me more determined than ever to believe that there is a love out there—somewhere—that strikes like lightning. Because surely if love demanded perfection then none of us would ever find it. And if it is no more than a thing to be won via strategic campaign, then who amongst us would ever have the heart to try?

It has taken me weeks to accept that I am the apple fallen from your tree. I have avoided risk in my life every bit as much as you did and I’ve let the excuses become truth, every bit as much as you did. In protecting myself I’ve damaged myself.

Therefore, today, I step out of the shadows into full sunlight, naked and exposed. I hope and trust that the respect and commitment my reading community has shown to Shiloh they’ll extend to the real me.

I am the silent child watching, breathless, under the stairs. I am the girl with no parents. I am the blogger behind the mask. I am the woman who loved.

I am … and always will be … your daughter, Shirley Marr.