I mentioned in my second post that my mother was a really, really, really crap mother. That was a sweeping statement for me to make. She was quite crap a lot of the time. Some of the time she was quite good. Let's start with the good. I grew up on Auckland's North Shore, which in the 80s was a bubble of white surburban blandness. Nothing much happened (except for out of control teenage parties) and the biggest danger was the occasional paedophile that haunted the beach or prowler that lurked outside lit windows in the dark. But in the pre-teenage years, the Shore was pretty good. Living near a beach is great for a kid. And in those days, while stranger danger was starting to concern our parents, some still had freedom to skip down to the beach unaccompanied, and meet up with friends. In my household, we had an even longer leash than in the others.

My parents split up in '84. For 14 years, my mother had played housewife with varying degrees of success, and was less than successful in the latter years. An appetite for booze, herb, parties and younger men got the better of her. And so it was that my father moved over the bridge and my mother made up for lost time.

So, we were in the bubble, but we were not of the bubble. For those who watch the local TV series 'Outrageous Fortune' we were the Wests of the Shore. Our place was known for its parties. My mother, known for her herb. And us kids, well, you could say we had broader life experience than most other children on the Shore. This is the good I was talking about before (but this was a small silver lining to a rather large storm cloud). My mother was also about as 'foodie' as you got on the Shore in those days. While money was tight on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, there was usually plenty of food in the house, and my mother was championing local produce, fruits of the sea, and home grown (and no, I don't mean marijuana) long before wealthy Cuisine readers started driving to Matakana in their SUVs to stock up at the farmers' market. There were other good things about her - she was creative and appreciated art, she never cared what others thought, she was individual, she lived life her way. She wasn't boring.

But...she was also a selfish, emotionally abusive narcissist who regularly endangered and often harmed her children in the pursuit of a good time. A child deserves better than we got. I had always thought so, but becoming a parent was like shining a bright light on to all those things from my childhood that didn't seem right. Now I know so. A child needs the basics - food, drink, clothing, shelter. A child also needs security and unconditional love. It was these last two things that we didn't have. It can't have been easy being a single parent. In '84 my younger sister was still a baby, I was 8, my older sister was 12 and my brother was 18 and recently diagnosed as schizophrenic. But there are a few obvious things you can do to be a good parent, even when times are tough. I have devised a list that I think should be reasonably easy to stick to:

• don't regularly have parties with loud music into the small hours on a school night;
• don't regularly refer to your children as 'vermin';
• try not to invite strange men home from the local, particularly with young girls in the house;
• don't invite virtual strangers to live with you, particularly with young girls in the house;
• try to spend most nights not drunk or high on weed;
• try not to shoplift bottles of gin in front of your children;
• don't resort to emotional blackmail, particularly when the victims are your own children and are too young to understand what that is;
• when your partner hurls abuse at your children in a drunken rage, restrain yourself from egging him on;
• don't send a letter to your child's school telling them that your child is, despite the outward appearance of being a good student and nice person, actually a little bitch;
• practice saying "I love you" to your kids, without qualifying it with 'but...'
• try to be the parent, not the child;
• as much as possible, put the needs of your children first - they didn't choose this life and they depend on you;

There is plenty more advice I could offer, but I will leave the list at that.