One year has passed since the death of my dad. We were very close. The rawness of my grief has started to feel less intense, allowing me the space both to consider the true dynamics that were at play in my family when I was growing up, and to put a name to the perhaps less flattering ones.
I come from a large family of five half-siblings: I was the youngest, and a “love child”. My mother died 20 years ago. Blended families tend to be fraught with challenges, and we certainly had our share. The big house in Richmond where we lived looked perfect from the outside, and sometimes it was perfect on the inside, too, serving as the backdrop to many happy childhood memories. But it was also, as I have recently come to realise, host to a set of conflicting personalities, centred around one parent with narcissistic traits: my father.
