My mother told me one week after I turned 16 that she would be leaving my father and me. They had a turbulent relationship and although she had threatened to go numerous times, I never thought she’d do it.
But when I arrived home from my Saturday job the next day, the house was empty — she had taken her precious face creams, china and pictures with her.
The hangers in her closet were bare and motionless. The bottom shelves were no longer covered by her shoes.
My entire body was shocked. My body felt like it had been sucked into the ground.
She hadn’t disappeared completely, however. It was clear to me exactly where she was. She had simply followed through on her threat and abandoned us for a life with three young male lodgers, living in the house she’d secretly bought next door.
Diane Danvers Simmons celebrated her 16th anniversary just one week after her mother, a 60-year old woman, passed away. Pictured with Diane and Mary, her mother.
It was that afternoon when I decided to get up the nerve to go from my home at No 49 (with its white stucco walls, baby-blue doors, and white door), to our new house at No 47. No 47 had cream-coloured walls with a green front door. This is her new home.
For a second, I stood in front of both houses and looked back at them. There were two houses and two doors. Two parents. . . I am the one. When I rang it, I was scared and lonely.
Mum opened her door formally, as if she were expecting the Queen over for tea — no affection, no expression, and absolutely no guilt. When I asked her what was happening, she sighed and said: ‘Diane, I’ve given you and your father 16 years of my life and I’m done. You’re big and ugly enough to take care of yourself.’
She added: ‘I’m not asking you to choose. I’ve made the decision for you. I’m not taking you. I’m leaving you with your dad.’ This distressed me. Wasn’t a mother supposed to take her child if she left?
‘How did Dad take it?’ I asked, in misery and disbelief. ‘Who’s going to tell him?’
Her swagger faltered for a moment. ‘You are,’ she replied.
She hadn’t even bothered to tell him. I was a cowardly, smart and self-centered, so it wasn’t my job to tell my father.
Mum was meticulous about her plans for Mum’s departure. She had purchased the West London home she was renting and sold it a few years before. Dad did not know about the purchase.
Now, she had the independence and freedom she’d been craving and none of the boring drudgery of marriage or motherhood.
Diane (pictured), said that her mother, a fiercely independent woman, didn’t want her to be bound by another child. Diane was so happy when her parents got married quickly and moved on with their lives.
On that day, I vowed to never do to my children the same things as my mother. But then, decades later, when my own daughter turned 16, I found myself standing in my mother’s shoes — and I realised there were worrying parallels.
My parents’ marriage had been one of convenience or, rather, inconvenience, when I came along by accident.
Mum was named Mary and was dating Lou at the time. She assumed that Lou was playing a prank on her when he told her she was pregnant.
Recently divorced Catholic woman with two children. She had one child from her first marriage and she was now 18 years old. He was 14 years old.
This fiercely independent woman didn’t want to be tied down by yet another child, but it was 1959 and there was no other solution. They quickly married me and moved on to raising my children.
She left Dad and me to live in the house she’d bought next door
The family were a well-off and middle-class, with two holidays a year on the Continent. Dad was an entrepreneur who owned a small business and had been considered for the post of mayor in Ealing.
We moved from the city to our suburbs when I was five years old. Isleworth seemed idyllic, but Mum was miserable. She was taken from her circle of family and friends.
Dad, who was traditionalist, forbade her to work. His name was not good with a wife who worked. But my mother had already raised two kids and had enjoyed a busy life of working in a members’ bar, managing a newsagent, and acting as landlord to her various properties. She felt like her spirit was being crushed.
Diane claimed that because her mother moved out of her home as a child when she was 16 years old, she considered herself a grown-up woman. Pictured: Diane with her mother, Mary
It was her courage that had allowed her to escape Ireland when she was only 16 years old, and start a new home in England. She again had that courage to leave her husband, who was Catholic, in 1950.
Her second marriage was a failure and she reacted by railing against it. I remember a lot of ‘God help me’ and ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’. The words ‘depressed’ and ‘menopause’ weren’t bandied about the way they are now, so no one understood her mood swings.
She loved to work — it gave her a sense of fulfilment and interaction with other people. And, worse, she felt Dad didn’t appreciate her.
When I was 16, she was 60 and her identity was in spiraling. Her situation was not helped by her narcissistic personality. She walked out.
Although it felt awfully familiar, something in me was still missing.
Because she’d left her own childhood home when she was 16, to her mind I was a grown woman at that age. She didn’t see me as an innocent child, and was totally unaware of my future without her.
The UK was not a common place for divorce and schools did not have counsellors to assist. I kept my abandonment a secret from even my closest friends, compartmentalising my life: school and school friends were my normal, and my best friend’s home was my refuge.
My salvation was dance and sport, which allowed me to get rid of stress and pain.
Dad was loving and caring at the time, he was 77. The next couple of years we lived together at No 49. Dad was loving and caring. It was me who ran the home, cooked his meals, and did laundry. Every day after school, I would drop in to see Mum.
Mum presented the arrangement — which suited her, and only her — as a perfectly natural way to live.
Diane (pictured at 17 years of age) stated that her mother, Diane, loved being the center of attention. She never admitted to or condoned her wrongdoing.
I’d often find her in her new kitchen preparing food, wearing her favourite pinny, vegetables ready to boil for the lodgers, and a cake tin on the counter. My mother would make me feel humiliated and hurt while I bowed and danced with the boys.
She was a 4 ft 11 in Irish pistol, who could cut you in two with a lash of her tongue — and then in the next breath, charm you with her hospitality.
Mum loves to be centre of attention. She was receiving far more attention at No. 47 than at home. They were treated like young nephews by Mum, and she didn’t show any remorse.
My visits were made more fun by having my boys with me. Mum was never in a bad mood when there were company. But her ambivalence towards the situation she’d put me in made me feel neglected, inconsequential.
My occasional outbursts (‘I don’t know how to run a house! How am I ever going to have time to do my homework, or see my friends?’) were ignored. Mum let me flounder. She never acknowledged or accepted her wrongdoing.
On one visit, she laid into me: ‘I’ve wasted 16 years raising you, doing everything for you, and being married to that ungrateful b******.’
With every ounce of energy I could rally, I challenged her: ‘In other words, what you’re really trying to say, Mother, is that I ruined your life, and you wish I was never born?’
‘Yes, it would have been better if you weren’t,’ she countered.
Diane (pictured), said that in her late 20s she fell for the lure of having it all. She left her job after Natalie, just three months old, convinced.
At that sledgehammer blow, the emotions I’d worked so hard to control since her departure flooded out. To her, I felt useless.
Photos of me at that time show an uncontrollable sadness.
Over the years, my mother’s behaviour became increasingly erratic: one moment a love bomb, saving me when I was in debt, the next making grand promises she’d retract without explanation.
My father passed away when I was 23 years old. Mum encouraged me not to move far from my mother’s house, but I had too many memories (I thought I even saw his ghost!) that I needed to go.
Finally, at the age of 27, I moved to America to take up a role with an advertising agency in the Saatchi & Saatchi group. It was my fresh start far from the past and Mum’s shenanigans.
She was delighted. It was all she had wanted — I was having the career she’d wanted for herself.
It’s not surprising that I didn’t intend to be a mother. I was delighted to be running free from all the family responsibility I’d felt so burdened by during my teens. Because she was feeling constrained by being a mother, my mother left and I did not want that to happen.
Then, in my late 20s, I became seduced by the idea of ‘having it all’. I suppose that my job as senior vice-president of an advertising agency could be continued and I could hire nannies so my kids are well taken care of.
Bill was 32 when I got married and Natalie was one year later. But I returned to work when she was just three months old and realised with shock and clarity that I didn’t want to be that kind of mother. So I quit.
Being a mother full-time was not easy. When Natalie was a year old, I was approached to go back to work and I agreed to return as a consultant, provided I could be home to enjoy dinner with my children and put them to bed (Natalie’s brother, Nick, came along three-and-a-half years later).
Diane claimed she was late 40s. Natalie (pictured) was very close to her age at the time her mother died. Natalie was left wondering what had happened to her brave career.
I’d been living in America for more than 15 years when I flew back with my children to see Mum. As I was angry at her for staying with her older half-sister and bitterly estranged sister, she told me Lou, whom I loved so much, may not have been my dad.
I was compelled to seek help from a therapist after it became the final straw.
That was the first time I heard the words: ‘What your mother did was wrong. You don’t need to make excuses for her any more.’
Natalie was almost the same age as me when Mum died, while I was in my 40s. I also went through a crisis. I started asking: ‘Who am I?’ I’d built my life around my family and now I found myself wondering where that fearless career woman had gone.
This was all so familiar. Now, I too felt as if something inside me was missing, and I had to find a way to spread my wings again — without throwing my children out in the process.
Bill seemed to be moving in opposite directions from me. Living separately was an option. Bill stayed in the house next door, while I remained at home. We also worked together as a family for holiday celebrations and other family functions. I am not surprised by this unusual living arrangement.
I was very much in danger of repeating my mother’s pattern, and that worried me deeply.
The only way to move forwards was to try to forgive my mother for what she’d done. After I had finished my 16th grade year, I traveled back to England to speak to my siblings and other friends. I decided I would share my story — the heartbreak, madness, love and hate — in a book.
Writing this story and exposing the trauma I suffered has allowed me to be grateful, understand, and, if you’re lucky, even admiring my mom.
She’d had a tough life, and, ultimately, her behaviour toughened me up for the world, instilling in me the courage and ambition that set me on the path to a successful career.
I can’t change what she did, but I can take the good from it and live my life as best I can. The truth is, love is messy, but it is all that matters: the last words my mother said to me before she died were the ones I’d always needed to hear: ‘I love you Diane, I always have.’
Bill and me are back together happily and we have a great relationship with our children. Natalie, now 28, and I have huge fun recording a podcast together, called Mothers & Daughters Unfiltered.
Writing about my experiences as a teenager and trying to understand how my mother became ‘the woman next door’ has given me a greater capacity for empathy, love and, yes, even forgiveness.
Adapted by LOUISE ATKINSON from My Mother Next Door by Diane Danvers Simmons, published by Koehler Books at £12.99. © Diane Danvers Simmons 2021.