She was one of the most famous people in the world but above all she was a mother and nothing took that away from her.
A lot has been said and written about the turbulent life of Princess Diana after she became a member of the royal family. She never had the fairy tale romance with her husband, the Prince of Wales, Charles, that she had hoped for. The extreme media scrutiny and a troubled personal life made Princess Diana's life tougher by the day; until she decided to speak up and end the trauma that was ruining her peace of mind. Her married life and divorce were overly publicized affairs but what many people do not know is that her life before marrying Prince Charles was no less dramatic.
Lady Diana Spencer's father John Spencer and mother Frances Ruth Roche decided to part ways when Diana was a little child. Due to her complex and tense relationship with John, Frances went on to marry her lover Peter Shand Kydd after a bitter, all-out divorce with her first husband. Frances was also forced to give up custody of her children including Diana's. The separation from her mother and witnessing the trials and tribulations her family had to go through at a tender age had an adverse impact on her.
In the Royal House of Windsor documentary, narrator Gwilym Lee spoke about what Diana remembered about it.
“A witness to her parents’ acrimonious divorce, she and her siblings were the subjects of a bitter custody battle. As a result, Diana’s mother had to give up her children,” Lee said. “Diana later admitted she had been haunted by the crunch of the gravel as her mother departed.” Diana was mostly raised by her father and nannies which may have left her lovelorn and emotionally broken.
“Diana’s neediness stemmed from a troubled childhood,” Lee claimed, according to Cheat Sheet.
“She was damaged, mentally, by her experiences. And then moving into the royal family was the worst possible scenario that she could have found for herself,” royal biographer Junor said. Royal expert and author Ingrid Seward wrote in her book The Queen and Di: The Untold Story that her lonely childhood and her parents' divorce caused her to have a strained relationship with her mother.
Diana's adolescent life faced another blow when her father remarried when she was only 15. Her stepmother Raine McCorquodale, not only got their ancestral home renovated, but she also lacked the motherly instincts for Diana and her siblings. The former Princess of Wales could never cope up with her parents' split, their bitter marital life and her father's romance with her stepmother.
Walking into the royal family with emotional turbulences and horrors from the past proved to be totally damaging for a young Diana. She never fit into the mold of the royal family and made a mark for herself in the world for being her kind and tender self. She also made sure that her troubled past and unstable present never tones down the motherly instincts that she had for her children William and Harry.
It is believed that the day Prince Harry was born, Princess Diana cried herself to sleep because the Prince of Wales had told her that his duty to give the country an heir was over and that the marriage is not of importance to him anymore. He was also annoyed with the princess for birthing a boy when he was hoping for a girl. Diana was truly in love with her husband and receiving wrath from him shattered her irrevocably.
However, she never let any negativity reach her children who she doted on every minute. From dropping them off to school herself to playing with them and spending most of her time them, she never let the horrors of her past shadow their growing up years. She knew that she does not want her children to go through the same trauma that she had to go through. Even during her tensed marital phase, she guarded her children fiercely and never let the bitterness between herself and Prince Charles reach the kids.
Many also believed that Princess Diana did not want to part ways from the prince because she wanted to ensure a normal upbringing of her children. She knew what it meant and how it felt to come from a broken home and she never wanted that for her children.
It's been decades since Princess Diana's tragic, untimely death but her children, Princes Harry and William exude the same kindness, empathy, and concern for the world that she was known for. She left the world long before her children grew up, but she did not fail to inculcate in them the most important qualities of life.
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