I loved the Spice Girls and Princess Diana. I was "that" boy you see in school playgrounds, hanging around with a group of girls. As I became a teenager, further tensions emerged. These issues continued into secondary school. Birthday party invites from classmates were a no-no these people were part of Satan’s wicked system. We were not allowed to take part in decorating the classroom for holidays or to sing Christmas songs. Throughout primary school, there were tensions between school, which was part of the godless “secular world”, and our beliefs. I do not remember my life before being a Jehovah’s Witness. Within a few years, he remarried an English woman whom he met through the church, and she became our joint guardian. I am not sure exactly why he did, but the prospect of a better life must have sounded appealing.
![manhunt gay door manhunt gay door](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/d4/c6/e3/d4c6e32c73af28946ab6e2e42b3c1d7a--hot-male-models-hot-dudes.jpg)
Unlike the millions of people who say “I’m not interested” or “I have my own religion”, my father listened. Not long after my mother left, Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on our front door. Though he and I are now estranged, I am thankful for what he did during that time. An older neighbour, Mrs Condon, would babysit us in her farmhouse when my father worked long days as a carpenter. My father was a single parent in his late 20s, living in a rural town in north Cork in the mid-1980s. My mother went to London and, after sporadically meeting with us three children for a couple of years, she then disappeared from our lives. My parents split up when I was about a year old. The reason it mattered was due to events that unfolded after she left our lives. She had long since surrendered that right. After 15 years away, she had no say over how I lived. Under different circumstances, revealing this would not have been so significant. There was one thing I felt compelled to say before anything else. However, what I vividly remember is the apprehension I felt meeting her, rather like waiting to start a job interview, tapping my feet, spinning my phone in my hands.
![manhunt gay door manhunt gay door](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-EARraAxr7_0/T2kqUZw5i1I/AAAAAAAAACc/sY4jHdvodoE/s800/386162_10150360011302816_726502815_8967841_1439436509_n.jpg)
I probably ordered my favourite snack at the time, a skinny latte with a slice of biscuit cake. It was at the height of the Celtic Tiger. We met in a cafe just off St Patrick's Street in Cork.
![manhunt gay door manhunt gay door](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-r8QFaD9O-kg/TakvZ61uNdI/AAAAAAAAB6U/bHp2-6v4KRM/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/HeatSecret09-0022.jpg)
I was 21 when I met my mother for the first time in 15 years.