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My father left my mother and me when I was only 6 the day after Christmas day... Such a cruel timing!

Anyway, the law in France say that when parents are divorced the parents share the custody. Usually, the mother gets to have custody of the child(ren) 90% of the time and the father gets to have his child(ren) one weekend out of two. The same applies to holidays.

Every year, it was an ordeal to go with him and his new wife and family. I say that because my father could not have cared less if I were there or not. In fact, he made me feel like I was burden, something to get rid of at every opportunity so that he could live his new found love life.

Therefore, they usually rented a cottage as far from the beach as possible and then on the first day there, we would shown the way in the car but we (I say we because I was paired with my father's new girlfriend's son who was a year younger than myself) would have to memorize it to get back by foot every evening.

The first year was a strange set up: we were staying in Nice. My father and his girlfriend were staying at some friend's flat. Franck (her son's name) and I were locked in a bedroom we shared from 7.00 pm until 7.00 am without anyone coming to see us or anything. Then our daytime activity was the same for 3 weeks every single day: the swimming pool on the other side of the road from the flat. We were sent there before opening time, come back for lunch, then straight out there again until 6.00 pm... How I hated this! We were the first ones in every morning and nearly the last ones out....

The following year, we went to Normandy where they had rented a damp and cold cottage three miles from the beach. My father drove us to the beach the first morning and told us to watch the way so that we could walk back in the evening! Then we were left on our device the whole day. This time: no lunch was even on the agenda. We were ordered to be back home at 6.00 pm. We had no money, no identity papers on us... We left to wander alone on the beach for hours on end. This was so cruel... Then back in the shitty cottage, as soon as we had our dinner we were ordered to go and stay in our bedroom until morning... We were spoken to like we were mere pieces of shit and not worth living. We were insulted, called "morons", "brainless bastards", "idiots", ect...

The next year, the surprise had worn off, and I knew it would be one month in hell for me. I cried when I left my mother and climbed in my father's car, the purgatory, the chamber before entering Hell. This time we were going to Vendée on the Atlantic coast of France. This time because the sea was more dangerous, we were told to stay out in the garden and not come indoors!!!!! Writing this I cannot believe that I have lived through all this shit! In the house garden we were bored...really bored. While my father and his woman were going on outings in the car and sunbathing on the beach we were left days alone in a garden. One day, we were getting so frustrated that we broke all the clothing pegs and pretended that each peg half was a space vessel... When my father came back we were hit, insulted in the usual way and had to skip dinner, go straight to bed until morning. The next day my father wanted us to redeem ourselves for having broken the pegs: we had to wash the whole house from top to bottom and no one was to speak to us and we were to speak to no one... He even said to us that we were so stupid that no one needed to speak to us because we could not bring anything to anyone. We were a waste of space.....