Frances Black, the singer and Independent senator, has opened up about the shame and stigma she felt after falling pregnant as a teenager and her parents said she could no longer use the front door of the family home.
After making an emotionally charged journey back to the places that mean the most to her, Ms Black recalls in the latest episode of RTÉ’s Keys to My Life, how the pregnancy in her teenage years tore her family apart.I knew Daddy was devastated. It brought huge shame on the family,” she says. “He couldn’t bear to even look at his beautiful daughter and think ‘she is pregnant’. He really, really struggled with it. And I carried a lot of shame around it.”
She secured a job in a creche to save money for when the baby was born, but was told she was no longer welcome in the front door in case the neighbours saw her. When sThe pregnancy led to a hasty marriage that was over in five years. Black then became a single mother of two young children, after the birth of her daughter Aoife. She was facing homelessness, but was saved when her friend offered her a spare bed in her home in Dublin “for very little rent... it really saved my life”.
After returning to the property for the first time in 30 years, Black recalled how it was also the place where her addiction began taking hold, once she’d put the children to bed each night.It was loneliness, I suppose, and then it just escalated. Once I started drinking I couldn’t stop until I passed out to numb out the loneliness, to numb out whatever that was going on. The insecurities, the low self-esteem, the ‘not being good enough’. Everything. The children were young at the time but it must have been very difficult for them.”he came home at the end of each working day, she says: “I’d have to go around the back so the neighbours wouldn’t see me.I remember feeling that strength of, ‘I will do this and it will be OK, no matter what’.”
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