“This is the most shameful letter I have written”

When Ella Ward was diagnosed with a rare cancer and told it was probably terminal, she began writing to her young daughter so she could still provide some mothering if she were no longer around. In an extract from her book, 27 Letters to my Daughter, Ward strips herself bare and admits to a lifetime of hating her body

I have been lying to you since you were born. As I write these letters, I’m still lying to you. As a new mother I lived my whole life with you in the audience – nothing was off-limits. I sat on the toilet with you suckling at my breast, I vomited with your toddler hand gripping my back, I changed my tampon in cramped shopping-centre toilet stalls while you watched from close quarters. Does this disgust you? It shouldn’t. It didn’t then.

Being a mother of a very young child is to become completely exposed because there is nowhere else for you (or them) to go. A child’s all-seeingness removes any room for vanity, decorum or modesty.

Yet putting the brutal intimacy of bodily fluids aside, in those early days it was easy to deceive you.

Now, you are older. We rarely share a bathroom stall. But you see more, and you hear everything. Your eyes narrow and lips purse, and I wonder at what age you’ll realise the extent of my deception. Or if you already have?

I have lied to others. Lovers, friends, strangers. But the lies have changed. I used to protect my truth of how hungry I was. Now I protect my truth of how much I still desire to be hungry.

And how I equate it all with being beautiful.

I often wonder if it’s just me. If every other mother around me is as confident and accepting as they project they are. As I’ve been told I should be. As I pretend I am to you. Sometimes the truth seeps out and I glimpse someone who is living the same lie as I am.

Gastro is going around: “Oh, give it to me, I could lose a few kilos.”