MARGARET HEYES holds her daughter's hand tightly and smiles. As they pose for photographs, she seems lost in the moment. Gazing into the eyes of her grown-up child, her love is on show for all to see.
"She has never let me down," she says slowly with a sincere expression that speaks volumes to the daughter she once, many years ago, so painfully told she had never wanted.
Just moments earlier, 97-year-old Margaret had been resting in the bedroom
of her Blackford care home, where she has been living with dementia since December.
Sarah Macmillan, her 57-year-old married daughter, was in the foyer, relaxing with a cup of tea, speaking openly about their turbulent relationship, stemming from Sarah's premature birth and her separation from her mother for the first six weeks of her life – Margaret, fighting for her life in hospital, had no idea she had even been born.
And it would be almost two years later before an official diagnosis of postnatal depression would be made.
"My mum and I did not bond," Margaret Sarah says frankly. "It fractured the family."
It's hardly an exaggeration; considering the events of the last 57 years – Margaret didn't even attend Sarah's wedding – it's amazing they are even on speaking terms, never mind able to enjoy any sort of loving relationship.
Their story began on October 21, 1950, when Sarah was delivered by emergency caesarean section in the Capital's Elsie Inglis Hospital, Abbeyhill. Her weight was just under two pounds.
Margaret and her husband Harry Heyes had only discovered she was pregnant two months earlier. She had been preparing to go back to work as a primary teacher as their five-year-old son John began school and Harry was working as a customs and excise officer at a distillery in the city. Life was just as they had always hoped it would be – they had the one and only child they had planned and wanted.
"Basically, my mum was not at all well. She was losing weight and being sick a lot, and had become really skinny," explains Sarah.
"She went to the hospital for checks – the doctors thought that she might have a tumour, so they were going to investigate. The 'tumour' turned out to be me."
But Margaret's pregnancy was only the first shock to knock the couple sideways. At just 30 weeks, Margaret went into labour and she was rushed into surgery. Few gave the premature child much of a chance of survival and Margaret herself was in a bad way after the delivery. She remained in hospital for weeks, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Margaret had been suffering from the potentially life-threatening condition of pre-eclampsia, which then led to severe convulsions after Sarah was born.
"The doctors didn't want my mum to know I was born, because they thought it would add additional stress. Things were very different back then," she says. "To be honest, they thought I was going to die anyway – but I didn't."
Sarah was finally discharged from hospital after six months, with her weight up to five pounds.
Making daily treks to the hospital, her father Harry visited both the women in his life separately – as well as tending to his young son at home – following doctors' instructions not to worry Margaret with news of her tiny daughter's existence.
Formerly from Liverpool, Harry had no family of his own to call on in the city for support, and when doctors broke the earth-shattering news to him that his wife – now a victim of full-blown eclampsia – was likely to die, he took the decision to name his daughter after her.
"My name is officially Margaret Sarah Claire," Sarah smiles. "But the Margaret, after my mum, was only added on just before my dad registered my birth. I'd been getting called Sarah, and always have done since."
Looking back, Sarah says she always knew something was wrong, but most of the details were only revealed to her by her father on his death bed in 1993. He was attempting to make up for years of unexplained pain by telling her what had happened when she was born. He died of prostate cancer after the condition had spread to other parts of his body.
"I was very close to my dad – very close," she smiles. "If I hurt myself when I was young, I went to him.
"I never really felt part of the family when I was growing up, so it was a release to know why."
Sarah admits that at the time she thought her childhood was normal, even though she had a constant feeling of being somehow detached from goings-on in the home.
Her mother – who was diagnosed with postnatal depression when Sarah was two, a fact she only learned in adulthood from her father – rarely enjoyed activity in the home. Sarah and her brother were unable to have friends round on a regular basis and her mother often struggled to cope with the hassles of daily life. As a result, Sarah was forced to a repeat a year of school because her mother so often failed to take her.
"I remember we had a big front door that my mum would close," she smiles. "Sometimes the bell would sound and she would look at me and hold her finger to her lips, so I stayed quiet.
"Sometimes she couldn't cope – not even to take me to school."
Since Margaret has been admitted to live in her care home, it has emerged she may suffer from a form of bipolar depression – extreme highs and lows – which Sarah believes she may have suffered from in early adulthood. Couple this with the shock of an unexpected pregnancy, a serious illness, the premature birth of a child and postnatal depression, and the results have been Sarah's life.
She smiles: "I remember my mum once saying that she had not wanted me.
"I really think everything would certainly have been different if she had not had her mental ill health. There were times when I was angry, but I always knew it wasn't her fault.
"I am sorry for her."
Sarah has been married for 36 years to Charles, "her rock". But having not meeting met the approval of her mother when they met back in the early 1970s, Sarah was thrown out of the family home, getting married without her parents' presence. Her father apologised as he died. "I told him it was fine," she says. "My dad was not very brave – he was scared."
With four children of her own, Sarah is determined not to let history repeat itself, forming close and "honest" bonds and making sure they had a relationship with her parents.
"I have no regrets about the past. I might have felt guilty, though, if I had kept my children away from them, especially my dad," she says.
As they sit together, Margaret admits her memory is now patchy, but that she remembers being very proud of her children when they were born.
Sarah smiles, stressing she is now closer to her mum than ever before. "Perhaps that's how she would like to remember it having been.
"I don't need to go over all of this with her, though – I've sorted it out myself."
