The woman for whom my father left my mother when I was a baby was my stepmother for a time, but she wasn’t wicked – not like the ones Walt Disney had introduced me to as a child. She never locked me in a dungeon; there was no talking looking-glass. There were stories, however: stories of wrongdoing and battle lines drawn. I never attempted to verify them, but they became a feeling I couldn’t shake, lodged in some hard-to-reach place.
And so there was a small part of me that wondered if she knew dark magic after all. Perhaps I couldn’t detach myself from tales of evil stepmothers that were burrowed in the roots of popular culture. Perhaps my feelings came from what I heard had happened in the aftermath of the affair. But I’m sure, at least in part, it was my brain’s attempt to protect my young, bruised heart. She must have somehow lured my father away, I decided, unable to accept that it was an act of agency on his part.
As the years passed, life inevitably moved on. She and my father broke up. I grew up. To me, this woman became simply a plot point in my life story, a small but pivotal character from an early chapter and one who belonged firmly in the past. She was defined only by the chain of events in which she was involved and how they affected me.
Until, that is, I heard her talking on the radio. It was a cold Tuesday evening. I was in my rented room in Hackney, just big enough for a double bed and a stack of books. I was in my late 20s and was starting a career in journalism. It was a rare evening in. The soft glow of a bedside table lamp and the murmur of the radio kept me company as I folded clean washing. As she was introduced, the presenter’s voice barely registered to me, muffled under the weight of other thoughts about work and money. But then she started to talk.
She was not someone you would expect to hear on the radio, but her accent was unmistakable to me, even after all those years; it was almost two decades since I had last seen her. Her voice was a buried memory suddenly exposed to air and light – and ringing like an alarm through my chest.
I sat down, a half-folded sheet draped on my lap. Suddenly, I was both in the past and in the present. I was the little girl on a west London street outside her apartment. And, 20 years later, she was in my east London flat, as if sitting on the end of my bed, confronting the woman I had become. Later on, I would wonder about the timings; just as I was figuring out who I was, chance forced me to confront my origin story.
As an academic, she had been invited to talk about human behaviour. Through the radio, she sounded warm, funny and clever. She sounded like someone I might like. She talked about love and how hard it was. She talked about not always making the right choices – the choices that changed the course of my life and have shaped me ever since.
The character in my life story from a long time ago had stepped off the page and morphed into something altogether more alive. An accidental collision across the airwaves had shown me that she was complicated, flawed, regretful. She was now no longer a 2D cartoon. She had become real, relatable, human.
My realisation gave birth to a new understanding of forgiveness. Up until this point, the actions of others often fell into binaries, driven by a youthful simplicity – the good and the bad, the wrong and the right. I believed accepting the grey areas of life was for those who lacked the courage of conviction. But here I was, treading water in a place that did not forget the damage she had caused, but acknowledged for the first time that she, too, had lived with those consequences.
I began to see the grey elsewhere. I began to reconsider friendships I had left behind and individuals I had written off. A new filter appeared in my vision. I was no less aware or vulnerable, but people, I started to appreciate, were complicated. Forgiveness wasn’t a case of backing down or an agreement to erase or forget; it was the understanding that we all might do things we regret, which we might carry with us for years to come. Now, I see people and their actions in a wider context; I see how confusing, conflicting and messy fallibility – the most human trait of all – can be. And with that, there is peace.
Wild Hope by Marisa Bate is out now (HarperCollins, £16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
