It's my party and I'll cry if I want to...

I didn't cry, but it was a close-run thing.

I should probably explain...

Much has changed over the last year. That's probably stating the obvious. With the decline of Steff's mental health, culminating in her hospitalisation, relations between me and her family reached an all-time low. This is, in hindsight, totally understandable. Indeed, I've since discussed this with Steff's key-worker who helped me to realise that I did something similar towards Esteem, the early intervention service who deal with her care.

Nancy and I never really got along. I had met her once before Steff and I got together. She wasn't impressed. Apparently, when Steff told her we were together, her first response was "Fuck!"

She thought Steff could do better, a view shared by some of her friends at the time as well. We're still together, and she's not friends with those people anymore...

But your mum is always your mum, so her opinion has always counted for much more. Over the next 4 1/2 years, Nancy barely concealed her contempt for me, while chipping away at Steff when I wasn't around. She should be with someone who can provide for her financially. She shouldn't hold out for someone she loves, because Nancy did that and it ended in tears. That sort of thing. She also took a dim view of my physical condition, stating on more than one occasion (to Steff, never to me) that there was nothing wrong with me.

Then, when Steff finally plucked up the courage to tell her mum she was in hospital (she didn't tell her mum the first time she was in hospital due to her poor reaction when she was told of Steff's previous and incorrect diagnosis of depression), things went from very bad to very, very bad.

She called me up, accusing me of bullying Steff to get money from her and mismanaging her finances for my own benefit. She told Esteem that I was the reason Steff was unwell, that returning to live with me in our home would only make her worse. She asked Esteem to look for assisted living accommodation for Steff and to inform the Department for Work and Pensions that our benefits claims should be separated as we were no longer partners.

On top of having the love of my life in a terrifying situation and being, despite the offers of help and support from friends and family, utterly alone, I had to deal with all this...

Then, around December, something just clicked.

The groundwork for this was laid by Esteem over the course of 6 weeks or so with their Family Work course, where Steff, Nancy and I would get together with Steff's key-worker and doctor for a 2 hour session to work on dealing with her illness as a team. Without that input, I'm not sure we could be in the situation we're in now. However, after a month or so of Steff's symptoms returning and causing her real distress, things were quite tense again. Then Nancy, completely contrary to everything that had gone before, asked me to come through to Motherwell to help me look after Steff. This, as far as I can remember, is the first time she admitted that she didn't know what to do for her daughter and that she needed help. That must have been an incredibly difficult thing for a mother to admit.

She sat down with me and spoke about what we could do together to help Steff. We agreed on a course of action involving Esteem. We were putting the skills we had learned at Family Work to proper use for the first time.

Since then, Nancy has tried her best to make me feel welcome in her home and part of her family. The three of us spent Christmas and New Year together. I lived in her home for weeks while Steff was recovering from her setback. I believe having both her mum and her partner there to look after her, and not have resenting each other, made a huge difference to her recovery. Since then, Steff has improved at a rapid rate. We are settling in to our new home with a dear friend. The start to this year, despite the backdrop of cuts and uncertainty for folk in our position, has been extremely positive. We're looking forward to the future with a sense of optimism that has been absent for far too long.

As anyone who is reading this is probably aware, it was my birthday on Wednesday. We had already made plans to go through to Motherwell before I realised that was the day of my birthday, and I didn't have anything planned for celebrations until the weekend, so we kept our plans and went through. Steff told me on Tuesday that we were going to her gran's for tea after dinner. I didn't realise that Nancy had arranged with her family to have a little tea party, complete with birthday cake and candles. I was incredibly touched. I don't know how long it's been since I celebrated my birthday like that. To go from contempt and suspicion to acceptance and belonging in such a short space of time... A few months ago I didn't know how things would ever be put right again. It was easier than I could have ever expected.