Mum guilt: Author Rhian Elizabeth’s anguish over teen parenting

She said her latest book, a collection of poems called “girls etc” was an “attempt at an apology” to both her daughter and herself.

In her poem ‘If we could just go back I’d push you higher’ she recalls half-heartedly pushing her young daughter on a swing and “playing at being a mother the way you played with your dolls”.

“You deserved so much better, so much better,” she writes.

Today Rhian, who lives in Cardiff, has three published books, is a Hay Festival writer at work, writer in residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Tranas, Sweden, and also at night school studying to be a counsellor.

But those early days of juggling being a teenage mum in Tonypandy, Rhondda Cynon Taf, while studying at university is what she finds herself writing about.

“Guilt / is a roundabout / that won’t ever let you get off,” she writes.

Of her parenting-style she said: “I was 16 and I just simply wasn’t very good at it.

“You see all these happy photos on Facebook of mothers enjoying spending time with their kids like it’s the most treasured thing in the world to them but I’d have to fake it, have to force myself to do it and pretend to engage but I wasn’t, I wasn’t engaged in parenting and I know my daughter would’ve picked up on it.”