"You're going to school!" My mother had angrily scolded me, literally dragging my tiny five year old self along a tree-lined private road that led us to the entrance of my new school.

This wasn't first day nerves, this was three-days-in angst.

Even at five years old, I knew that I didn't fit in there. That I'd never truly be accepted there. My mother had attended the very same school when it was run by the nuns, and had suffered humiliation and punishment at the hands of those nuns, so in hindsight, why she thought that it would be okay for me to go there...I will never know.

Mum was dragging me to the Catholic school. Where judgemental minds and prejudiced souls rejoiced.

Mum wasn't a good Catholic mother, she couldn't even be a good Catholic girl. She had been thrown out of school, because of eventual aggression towards the nuns. Mum's demons then continued to taint her, because she also got thrown out of her next school because of an increase in her violent outbursts towards the teachers.

Mum had a bad name and bad history with this school, I am quite surprised that we both didn't sizzle then combust into damnation when we first crossed the threshold of that Catholic school.

The problematic Catholic girl, had grown into an unmarried mother. That unmarried mother, was now wanting her child to have a good and wholesome Catholic education—but I was tainted by ancestry association.

As young as I was, I knew I wasn't welcome there.

I was different to the other kids.

I was treated differently to the other kids.

The teachers spoke to me with disdain.

Looked at me with disgust.

So on that fourth day, I didn't want to go. I pleaded not to go. "Please, Mummy! Let me come home with you!" Was what I had loudly sobbed to my mother. The thought of being handed over to those judgemental and disdainful arms of education, terrified me.

"Mary Rose, you stop this right now...right now!" As soon as my mum's mouth tightened and her eyes beadily narrowed on me, I knew that I had to do just as I was told.

I found no solace from my mother on that day, and I wouldn't find any from that school—that was my very first lesson in learning how to cope on my own.

At five years old, I had to learn to be stronger.

I had to learn to be strong against the teasing and the discrimination.

There was no way I could change who I was, but I could guard myself against those who didn't like who I was.

It was such a young age to be so guarded and so protective of one's self, but it helped me get through those school gates, and it helped me get through those long and lonely school days.

When I was about twenty, I remember finding a picture that had been taken while I was at that school. I honestly didn't recognise the little girl who was looking back at me; she looked so emptily lost and so vulnerable. The camera had captured my childhood unhappiness, all of my hollowed-out hopes—it had sadly captured it all.

That lonely and vacant little girl was nearly seven years old in that picture. In my pale blue eyes, there was a deadness that still haunts me to this day. In those dead and pale blue eyes, I had unfairly carried so much—endless taunts from other children, the sedate cruelty from the teachers, an unhappy home life—on my small shoulders I had carried it all.

But that little girl had more to carry.

More that she had innocently kept hidden.

A more, that wouldn't be spoken of until many years later.

An unthinkable more.