I know I'm in my own world... it's okay, they know me here

Today is the third anniversary of Mum's death. Me and Dad and Lucy went to the churchyard this morning to take her some lovely flowers from the florist down the road. It's strange to think that it's been so long, and yet so short, a time since it happened. I guess I don't really think about it all that much any more.

For those of you who I've only become friends with recently, my Mum died of an aneurysm in her brain, very suddenly and quickly, over a couple of days, in the first week of December 2004. You could say we had a bad time of it - my sister was ill with glandular fever at the time, and I was in my final year of high school preparing to take some important exams. A month later our elderly dog had to be put to sleep, and that year both my Dad and my sister developed depression, and my sister's glandular fever turned into ME. It sounds as though I'm making it up to be dramatic, but I'm really not. That year, year and a half was awful, and it was one thing after another.

What I really wanted to talk about today, though, was how far I feel like I've come since. I failed to get the grades to get into university that year after everything that happened, so I reapplied and got jobs and worked. I learnt the value of money and how things really work in the world. I grew up. I found a course, and what will eventually be a career, that will suit me infinitely better than what I was going to do, and I am so happy doing it. I genuinely enjoy my lectures. I have become more self-sufficient and confident in myself, because I have had to.

As a result of everything that happened I am not only a much more determined writer but, I think, a much better one, even if only because I had to find an outlet for the way I felt and it expressed itself in thousands of words of writing that let me practice and practice and practice my skill. I feel like I have acheived a depth in my writing that I never used to have.

It feels sometimes like things have always been this way, that my mother never existed and it has always been the three of us. I can't remember her voice any more, or the way she smelled, or even her face without having to build it up out of photographs I remember of her. I think after a while those things just slip away from you.

I turned eighteen without her. I went to university without her. I will have relationships and get married and have kids without her. That hurts.

But I am stronger now than I ever was, and I'm grateful for that, even if I wish the reasons it has happened hadn't. I know what I want and I want to try hard to get it for myself, because I know that things don't always last.

I am proud of myself and where I am now. I hope she would have been, too.

Three years is a long time, and no time at all, for everything to be different.

I've been dreaming recently... I think because my sleep pattern has changed so I wake up at a time when I can remember my dreams...

Last night I dreamt that I kept seeing Mum outside my house looking in at us through the windows. Nobody else could see her, and every time I ran outside screaming for her she vanished right in front of my eyes. She was wearing her black coat with the red lining and the make-up she always used to wear and smelled like Estee Lauder, because that's my 'mother smell'. But she always vanished, and I was left standing on the lawn in the snow confused and upset and alone.

Some days it hurts more than others.