MY FIRST ‘MOMMY’ – AT 18
IT WAS a simple act of tenderness that made her realise she was loved, she was safe, she was home.
“Mommy washed my hair and dried and brushed it,” she says. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘I’ve never experienced anything like this – I must be the luckiest girl in the world’.”
Before then, Landi Lategan* (22) had no inkling of what it meant to be carefree or cherished.
By the time she was 16, she’d been a de facto mother in the abusive home in which she grew up.
She’d never known what it meant to enjoy the protection or love of a mother. As eldest daughter of the so-called
