Saturday 14 March 2015

More Happy Families

When she came to stay with me - aged about 12 - in my basement flat, she brought her younger brother with her. A slight, pixie-like kid with a mop of white-blonde hair like his father's.

As we walked along the streets - her making up lost time by asking me all sorts of questions about blood-relations she had barely met but which made up an extensive if hazy family tree from which she hung from one outward branch as a seemingly forgotten fruit - her brother would stroll on ahead, wrapped in his own thoughts and acutely aware that I was her father and not his. It was just convenient for his mother that he should tag along while she visited another part of the South.

Halfway through answering another question, I noticed him begin to veer uncomfortably close to the edge of the busy road, so shouted at him to stop right there, but he was not listening, so deep in his thoughts was he.

Knowing that I was too far away to physically prevent him from stepping off the kerb, I feigned extreme anger and shouted so loud at him that it would freeze him in his tracks. It was better than watching him be killed by a passing car.

Of course, he burst into tears at my outburst, but it did the trick and I only had to explain and console him for a few minutes before it was all forgotten. He has forgotten it, but I never will. My heart was racing at the time.

Later that evening, they both had a bath before going to bed, and he - being the youngest - had his before she did. When he had got out of the water, he called to me in a tearful voice so I went in to see what was upsetting him. It was pure anxiety, as it turned out.

"There's something wrong with my willy," he sobbed, but could not explain precisely what.

I asked him to show me what was worrying him, and when he pulled his towel away, there was a perfectly normal little thing which showed no signs of abnormality at all, and I told him so. This was the second time in one day I had to console him.

He went to bed, and she and I stayed up late into the night, me drinking wine and her just looking on as we chatted. As I opened the second bottle, she said, "You must be really thirsty!"

Having been apart from so long and at such a distance, the only way I could really relate to her was as an older brother. I did not have the right to behave like her father, and I know she would not have expected that, even if it were truthfully possible.

I slowly watched her natural interest in her father turn into a childish infatuation for a make-believe hero, and before we went to sleep, she said to me, "Oh I wish we could get married." What a strange combination of naivety and dimly understood beliefs about human relationships.

Years later when she could justifiably be called an adult, she suddenly said to me, "I am so glad that you didn't abuse me when I was a child."

Under what circumstances does a child say something like that to a parent, even if the parent is a comparative stranger?

Her childhood past is a closed door to me, only opened a chink every now and then for me to glimpse tiny parts of it.

She went through a very tumultuous period with her mother, probably reflecting the same tumult that her mother went through with her father, and her mother only told me small, disjointed snippets of both relationships, usually dropping them into ordinary conversations with no relevance to anything previously talked about. For instance, a telephone conversation with her mother, around the time when daughter was in early teens:

HER: "My finger is almost healed now."

ME: "What happened to it?"

HER: "Oh, H and I were having a huge argument a couple of weeks ago, and she went to her room and tried to shut me out by slamming the door on me. It chopped the end of my finger off."




25 comments:

  1. A friend demonstrating a chemistry experiment. Suddenly there was an explosion and he lost the best part of 3 fingers. He finally ended up as a top professor in his field. It's only when we are older that we can look back at life's lessons and see what they mean.

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    1. I think I am going to have to look back to see what you mean with this one, Gwil. At least the academic world didn't slam the door in your friend's face.

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  2. She sounds like my friend M who had a difficult mother to put it mildly and at the age of 8 chose to go and live with her step-father who brought her up on his own. Her own father was long gone and M never met him until she was 18. She is now 30 and finds relationships nigh on impossible.

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    1. I think there has to come a time when you stop blaming your parents for how you are as an adult, otherwise you never grow up, but some upbringings are much worse than others I suppose. The more I think about it, the luckier I seem to be in terms of a relatively decent childhood.

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    2. Tom, I completely agree with you on this....except for cases of really horrific abuse, I think that once people become adults they should stop blaming their parents and/or upbringing for their problems in life.

      At some point you have to move past an unpleasant (or even abusive) childhood unless you want to spend the rest of your life suffering because of it. You can make the choice to work through your baggage and leave it in the past, or you can spend the your life in the victim role, blaming your parents for your own bad decisions. I say this as the child of two (ex)alcoholics who both had undiagnosed mental health issues when I was growing up. I was lucky in that I was never physically abused, but there was a great deal of emotional abuse in our house and a LOT of dysfunction. Once I grew up I decided early on that I would NOT let those bad early experiences define me, nor would I spend the rest of my life dwelling on them. And even though it took years, as I gained maturity and perspective I was able to see my parents more objectively and to have some compassion for the issues they were grappling with back then. Of course I still have the occasional twinge of anger, or sadness, but then I let it go and keep moving forward. If you're going to hold on to childhood traumas forever and let them negatively impact your whole life, you may as well just curl up and die.

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    3. That is definitely the spirit.

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  3. Her comment about being thankful for not being abused as a child and the worries of her half-brother about his willy make me feel ill at ease, with what you told last time of someone else being around.

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    1. Me too, but it was many years ago. I did try and question the mother, but got nowhere with it.

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    2. I was also concerned about that, Brigitta.

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    3. This all hits too close

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    4. Did you have a piano teacher?

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  4. I, too, remember you telling us about your daughter Tom but maybe not in so much detail. If one has gone through such a thing then it probably does you good to talk about it. I have noticed that, once you open up about a difficult time in your life, you find that most people then tell you about something that has happened to them. Life is a series of up's and downs for everyone …. some having more down's than up's. There is obviously SO much going on there { … and more than you've told us, no doubt } …. no wonder things have been difficult.
    You also told us a story about pushing your daughter in a pram on a very windy day and the pram running away from you ... I think !! XXXX

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    1. I can only tell you about 10% of it all. The pushchair incident on the stormy coast was an admission of just how irresponsible I was at the time.

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  5. All of this leads to me remark Tom that not a single one of us is 'normal' whatever that might mean. We have all gone through our traumas and nightmare situations and we have all dealt with them in different ways - some more successfully than others.

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  6. So good t come down to Pat's summation. At some point each of us must take responsibility for ourselves and carry on. My sister's take is we are here to learn something. Some of us have learned more than we bargained for, I suppose.

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    1. There will be more, and it will be two generations on, but that treat is in store for you.

      Blogtopia is just as much as a myth as any other Utopia, but some things we want to hear, other things we don't. I don't discriminate.

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  7. I'm with Jennifer on this. Gotta live this life, not suffer it.

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    1. Yes, but if you find yourself suffering, then what would you suggest as the best way forward without external help?

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    2. Good suggestion, just so long as it isn't tortured art.

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  8. My daughter once reminisced that I'd 'never smacked her'. I thought what a strange recollection this was; almost as if it was quite normal for all her friends' fathers to smack them.

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    1. I think it was in the old days. It was even quite common for strangers to smack other stranger's children if they thought they were misbehaving. I would go up and smack the stranger, quite hard.

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