It is probably unsurprising for anyone who has followed this blog in the past year, that this weekend I again tried to kill myself. Having been bullied at the work to the extent that my eyesight was damaged, having lost my house, ending up living with my parents at the age of 45 and in a job that is so low paid I am battling even to find a room to rent that I can afford anywhere near the job, you can imagine why I feel down. Living with my parents is hard. I am grateful that I am not homeless, but the things that randomly make them angry is a great difficulty. When I was being savaged for having parked in the dark a few centimetres over from where I was apparently supposed to be and told that keeping the neighbours happy was more important than me getting to work and that anyway I was nothing more than a 'child' and incapable of finding my way through London suburbs, it seemed like I had reached the end. I have been considering suicide since my teenage years and have failed twice before.
As a teenager, there was solace in identifying the right tree to use and where I would source the rope. Unfortunately following the 1987 hurricane, those woods are now blocked and marshy. I was able to find a substitute tree, with two nails already in it to which to lash the rope, which I carry around in my car. I managed to create a reasonable noose and get it over a branch. I imagine that anyone watching would have found it comic. Unfortunately the tree was on a steep river bank and I could not get the bucket I was going to kick away to stay upright. I tried to do it from the ground, but either I got the rope too long so there was no drop or too short so that I could not get my head up to it. I tried swinging away down the bank and while the rope cut into my neck, the drop was not sharp enough and I simply swung back. A passerby simply walked on rather embarrassed. Men attempting suicide is clearly such a common sight these days in the UK that it did not rouse his interest. My mother ridiculed me with 'oh, you've done that before'. This made me angry and I wanted to rush out and try again, simply to prove to her, that I can at least get something right.
It is incredible just how much criticism people feel is necessary to give you on a daily basis. My parents have become so emotionally withered that they simply see me as a failure and a burden and keep finding new ways of telling me how useless I am. They even blame me for their faults. It was they who actively encouraged me to buy a house when I was about to pull out, yet now they tell me that it was the gravest error that I made. They forget that without them I never would have taken that step. I know parents freeze you in time at age 15, and I guess many of us have to cope with that. They edit history to put themselves in the best light, they forget any of their mistakes but harp on about others years later. Five years ago my father gave my girlfriend a lift. She does not travel often in cars and was terrified by how fast he drove. She asked him to slow down and this is still brought up against her again and again. I am reminded about how much effort went in to organising the lift and that she should be grateful that she was driven around so dangerously. Her mistake in expressing her dismay is still held against her and probably will be forever more.
Suicide needs sustained courage. This is why people often get drunk or take drugs before trying to kill themselves. Having spent twenty minutes, trying to get a rope to the correct height, I was exhausted and that courage faded from me. I fell to the ground and simply sobbed for some time. The one thought that worried me was that my father would simply destroy my will which is among my belongings rather than lodged with a solicitor. This would have eliminated one consolation, that at least my things would go to my girlfriend and her son. I had always believed that suicide is easy. However, there are technical issues that I have overlooked. Last time I tried to hang myself, the hook from which I strung the rope snapped, dropping me to the floor. I tried a drugs overdose, but was persuaded out of that by the woman I was living with. It is clear I need to search for the right sort of tree. I guess this is why 'gallows' trees were so important, there are in fact very few that you can find that work perfectly, especially if you are doing it yourself. As I still have a car, it seems the best approach to try next is asphyxiation. The trouble with that is that it is slow and I worry that I will lack the courage to see it through. Whilst I despise guns, it would be far easier if there was access to them in the UK as at least then I could be certain that I would not end up in the ridiculous situation of struggling to kill myself.
As I have noted before, the problem of failing to kill yourself is that the problems still have to be dealt with when you get back. I have been advised that I am a waste of space. People want me out of their way and out of their lives. The trouble is, social constraints stop them helping that to become a reality. I am left humiliated and hopeless.
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
Monday, 17 December 2012
Friday, 1 July 2011
The Life Your Parents Forgot
Back in 1992, when I was a mere 24, I attended a wedding back in my home town. Two of my friends who had been dating since they were at school had decided to get married. I am a big fan of weddings and went to at least one per year 1991-2002. Anyway, it was also a good opportunity for meet up with other old friends; I was living in Oxford at the time and saw those who had remained in the town where I grew up, only occasionally. I agreed to walk to the church which was only 3.2 Km from my parents' house with another friend of mine. It was a bright sunny day and we intended to drink, as it was neither of us had a car anyway. He and his brother lived with their parents, this being Surrey where rental accommodation is rare and house and rent prices are well beyond the means of young men doing ordinary jobs (he was a computer programmer; his brother worked in metallurgy). My friend's brother, who was two years younger than us, decided that walking would take too long and he would cycle. Whilst it is against the law to be drunk while cycling, you tend to get away with it much more and can stick to back routes where you are unlikely to encounter the police. In addition, I am not aware of any drunken cyclists killing anyone, unlike even sober car drivers tend to do pretty regularly. If you are that drunk you tend to fall off the bicycle and end up doing more harm to yourself than others.
What struck me was the how alarmed my friend's mother was about us going to the wedding on foot and by bicycle. It was in the middle of the sunny day, in suburban Surrey, not really a scenario that you feel has a high level of risk. We were going to a wedding rather than a bare-knuckle boxing match and yet she seemed to believe that we would necessarily come to harm and tried to persuade her two sons to not attend. They had known the groom since early childhood, yet she seemed to weigh her concern about their welfare above any thought of manners. Both the men decided to go against their mother's wishes. Of course, we all got there safely and had a very nice day all round. We drank at the reception but no-one was incapacitated and we came home by taxi and bicycle.
That incident was a minor if peculiar one. What I did not really take on at the time was what it signalled about how parents handle their adult children. At 24, I have been a writer with a growing reputation; I could have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station; I could have been in the Army, being shot at in Iraq; I could have been in prison; I could have had a wife and children of my own; I could have been running a business; I could have owned a house. Okay, so I had not done any of these things. I was, however, training to be a teacher, which suggested that the state, a school and numerous parents saw me as sufficiently adult to teach a class of pupils, up to 18 years of age. I was fortunate that after I started the course, I only had to spend another few weeks when looking for a flat in London, living with my parents, so, perhaps I escaped being treated like my friend and his brother, somehow as if we were frozen at the age of 15 forever more.
Part of the problem in the UK is that accommodation is so expensive. When you have businesspeople looking for rooms to rent as lodgers in houses, how can a young person working in a shop or a call centre able to get even space in a shared house. The only answer is parents. This is why the average age for people leaving home in the UK is now 36, an age when back in the 1960s you would have been expected not only to have your own place (rented or otherwise) but also a wife and children, and be on the verge of middle age.
I think the attitude of parents to their adult children is not only shaped by the economic necessities of trying to live in the UK. We live in a far more juvenilised society than even the 1990s, let alone the 1960s. People seem unwilling to take responsibility for any of their actions and baulk against anyone limiting what they do; the speeding issue is a case in point, huge credit card bills is another. Thus, parents who grew up in an earlier era (and remember someone born in 1981 is now 30), when people had to take more responsibility for their actions see their children ill-equipped. However, ironically, that is because we have all been hammered by media pressure to protect our children for the apparently ominpresent threats out there. By fearing all that might happen to our children we actually make them unable to cope when anything out of the ordinary, let alone genuinely dangerous occurs to them. In addition, by padding them from the hazards of the world, we give them a false illusion that they face no risks and that driving dangerously or spending without thought will never have any serious consequences, or certainly not ones that the parents cannot resolve.
Naturally, I am sure, many children like the extension of the adult safety net. This approach can be condemned as being a middle class attitude, but you only have to meet with families in poor parts of London or any other city to see, in fact, even among those on the minimum wage and on benefits this attitude of trying to insulate adult children from the world persists. I have seen parents divide up their own bedrooms so their grown up children can continue to live in the house. I have seen women go round to the houses of their daughters' boyfriends and shout at them from the street to stay away, often as a result of cross-racial relationships. You might argue that the motive here is that the poorer population know how really hard life can be; the middle classes just want to protect their children against the potential of having a hard life. The motives may vary, but the outcome is pretty much the same: treating adult children as if they were frozen in their teenaged years.
I suppose it is natural to perceive family members at a certain fixed position. You do not see your parents as they age. You see them everyday when they are growing up and these days when middle age seems to start when you are sixty, and people in their forties wear teenage fashions, your parents look much the same from 30 to 50 and sometimes beyond; my parents in their 70s look better than they did 20 years ago, the pressures of work having been shed from them. It is the same with your grandparents you tend to fix them at a certain age and forever remember them as that and it can be a shock to realise as an adult that they are 25 years older than when you first knew them. The trouble comes when we associate certain modes of behaviour with the age we have fixed our family member at. It can be hard as your parents' faculties begin to fade as they age because you probably still default to thinking of them how they were at 45 rather than 75. You are usually quickly brought back to reality when you see them again; it can be sad, but you generally adapt and begin quite easily to treat your parents the way you used to treat your grandparents.
The problem is that they too have frozen you in time. In my experience they tend to think you are somewhere between 15-17. You look like an adult to them, but they know that in fact you are very inexperienced of the world and are likely to make mistakes. You have to be warned about these things. Whilst you may resemble an adult, in their eyes, in fact you lack the ability to make adult judgements and you will make lots of mistakes. You can be talked to as if you have no knowledge or expertise or experience of the world, no matter how high-flying a post you might hold (especially if it is an industry your parents disapprove of or never felt was right for you) or how many lovers you might have. I must say, that in fact, this perception is not limited to parents. Back in 2002, my brother and I got into an argument in a Belgian street. He started bellowing at me about incidents that had occurred when I was 15 and he was 13, i.e. back in 1982. Since then the Cold War has ended, AIDS has been a global problem, apartheid has ended in South Africa, home computers had grown from 48k to many Mb capacity, we had been through years of Thatcher and Blair, and yet, he still saw the tensions between us as they had been as teenagers.
Maybe I am unlucky, I do seem to meet people who whilst not having shining careers themselves are surprised that everyone else is not more successful and again blame laziness. I had one friend who could not understand why I was not studying Korean (he would allow me to learn Japanese at a pinch) and was not making thousands of pounds writing history articles for magazines. He had no understanding that these things do not happen. The number of Britons who can understand Korean must be very limited and even those who are successful at article writing (and they are a select band who get lucky breaks) never earn the sums he assumed. He took his assumptions to be the truth, so any argument against him just showed up how cunningly lazy you were, trying to get out of easy ways to make money. It is people like this who must have been the witchfinders of previous centuries.
As you can guess, at 43, I am still facing the 'frozen in time' kind of attitude from both my brother and my parents. It has been exacerbated by me being unemployed for 12 months. Despite decades of mass unemployment, the default attitude for British people is that being unemployed is the fault of the jobless person; the economy and the attitudes of employers have nothing to do with it. If only the jobless person applies him/herself, then they will not be without work.
Being unemployed seems to give everyone a licence to tell you how to live your life, not least your parents. However, the advice is not restricted to job hunting. I have a girlfriend, she is the same race as me and the same religion. She is aged 5 years younger than me. She has a child that is not mine. She is not an alcoholic, she is not a drug addict, she is not involved in any criminal activity, she is not violent, she runs her own retail business. However, the attitudes of my father and brother towards her are as if she was stealing from me on a daily basis or plunging me in crime. I cannot stand people who stop members of their family linking up with people of a different race or religion, though I can understand the basis of their disapproval. Yet, in my case, there is not even this excuse. I could understand even if she was 20 years younger than me or 20 years older, but we seem to be very well matched, and vitally, makes me happy.
What gives parents and other family members the right to police the relationships that other adults in their family have? I would be frustrated if I had been 16 or 18 and was told I should not be seeing someone I was attracted to, let alone one I loved and who loves me back, and treats me incredibly well. How come, in our 30s and 40s, we cannot be left alone to form the relationships we want and maintain them, especially when they are as positive as the one I am in at present? I am now old enough to have potentially had grandchildren myself and yet I am treated by my family as if I am still not mature enough to run my life. I think it is somewhat an issue of discrimination against particular members of the family. As it took me many years before I had sex and did not keep my family informed about every short-term relationship I had; because my girlfriend had a child by a man who fled the country once it was conceived, both of us have been branded by our families as feckless and incapable of making our own decisions. This seems ironic considering that I have managed offices controlling thousands of pounds and my girlfriend runs her own business. Yet, clearly this is not enough to warrant us being treated like adults.
If these people were not family members I would have told them to back off very harshly and in fact, as it is, the persistence of my father and brother in trying to keep running my life has led me to break ties with them both. The picking on one member of a family seems common. My girlfriend has two sisters, one of whom is also a single parent. I have my brother who does not get treated the way I do, despite the fact for many years he settled to no career and spent months travelling, getting drunk and stoned, but now somehow is allowed to be an adult when I am not.
One friend of mine when living at home in his 20s was compelled to do the ironing and other domestic chores that his brother, only two years younger, was not compelled to do. His brother, having attended university was deemed to be above those things, yet has flitted from job to job, entered a marriage in which the woman two-timed him even moving her lover into their house and drained him of money before emigrating with yet another lover. It appears that some of us are marked out as 'black sheep' for our entire lives, on criteria which, objectively, would not suggest such labelling. It means that no matter how old we become we are never free of being treated as if we are incapable of running our lives without active family intervention. If I was an alcoholic, a drug addict, regularly in prison, then I could understand it. My own crimes have been being unemployed and falling in love with a single mother.
I had a friend who married in the late 1990s to a stunningly intelligent and beautiful woman. He was well-educated and had movie star looks. They shared a love of travelling to remote places and living adventurously. However, both had very good university jobs, were healthy, of the same age and were not involved in crime or addicted to drugs or alcohol. They seemed very well suited. Yet, from the start her parents disapproved of him and hounded the couple so much that they fled the UK for Belgium. Ultimately the pressure was such that they divorced. To me, given how rare happiness is in this world, to drive a couple that way seemed evil. Alright, there may have been a personality clash, but once your child is an adult you have to accept their choices. Destroying something that brings them happiness without harm, is perverse. However, I guess that these parents are not only frozen in time but also cannot see beyond their own petty concerns.
I have no idea who sets the rules. I have had one male friend who has been physically abused by one girlfriend and robbed from by another; I have one female friend who is always publicly disparaged by her husband, and yet no-one ever seems to speak out or criticise what is going on with them. Clearly myself and my girlfriend are in some category which allows people to tell us how to live our lives. Before coming to visit us, her father told her bluntly that she had to leave me. There was no reason given. I accept I am unemployed, but then are hundreds of thousands of men in the UK. I worked hard to try to get a job and having been to 28 interviews in 12 months, I finally secured work. It may not be the greatest job I could have got, it pays £7000 per year less than I received in my last post, but it is permanent, it uses my skills and those things are not to be ignored in the current economic climate.
I have never attacked my girlfriend (I have never attacked anyone) and am like a father to her child. We argue far less than is the apparent national average despite me spending the bulk of the day with her. I am not a drug addict, an alcoholic or a criminal. I do all that I can to make her and her child happy. Yet, it is not enough, she has been told repeatedly to leave me as I have been told repeatedly to leave her. There is no sense that I am an adult, that I can make my own decisions, make my own mistakes indeed, and live with the consequences. I cannot predict the future. Looking back there was little I could have done to spare myself from redundancy. Yet, somehow, I am expected to have prescient powers that would have allowed me in the 1980s to know what careers and which employers within those careers would be safe bets in the 2000s.
Remaining with my girlfriend then opens me up to further charges (and she has experienced very similar on her side from her father), that I am naive, that I have no idea what I am doing and need to be guided. Mistakes dating back decades are raked up for both of us. For me it is joblessness, for her it is having a child as a single parent, that seem to be the clinchers, the things that rule out us being able to shape our lives properly or to make decisions. I am not even permitted to say I am going for a test for Asperger's (let alone doing it) without being ridiculed at length by my father.
I am a man, I have run offices, I have made financial decisions, I am trusted by the state to drive on the roads, to vote, to pay taxes, to obey the law, yet I am not deemed capable of taking decisions on my own health and above all on my own relationships. My girlfriend and I have been utterly loyal to each other, we have had no other sexual partners since being together and yet our parents see the other as being reckless and bad for their child. If they knew how hard it is to find someone who you are compatible with, I would hope that they would be pleased for us that we have managed to find someone who makes us happy. Even if my girlfriend had all those bad characteristics, it would be up to me and her to decide whether the relationship should continue.
We have been facing so much anyway, that I would just beg for her and my family members, if they cannot tolerate the partner we have chosen, just to stay quiet. If you cannot say something nice, say nothing at all is what I would say. However, any attempt to get them to back off elicits even more patronising criticism from both sides that even at ages 43 and 38, we are not capable of making our own choices and have to have parental intervention to show us where we have gone so wrong.
Parenting is not about ensuring that your children live their lives very precisely the way you have set out, even if that was possible (and, of course, parents, whatever they might think, are fallible; my father lent me money so I did not have to pull out of the house purchase and now says, three years on, that that was a big mistake on his part and I should have continued renting). Parenting is about equipping your children to deal with the world out there and what it might throw at them. Yes, you will act as a fall back, a safety net as far as you can, for many years. However, once your child is an adult you have to recognise that the state views them sufficiently mature to do all the things like vote, have sex, die for their country, go to prison, whatever and live with the consequences. You may disagree with how they live their lives, but if they are happy and are not making other people unhappy, it is not your place to intervene.
You can never control another person's life, even your partner's and to try to do so ends in bitterness and failure. As a result of my brother and father and my girlfriend's father constantly haranguing us to end the relationship, we feel large chunks of our families have turned their back on us.
Men take it harder than women which is why I have ceased contact with my brother and father over their repeated criticism of my relationship. Ironically, my girlfriend keeps trying to get me to make it up with them. However, being an Asperger's sufferer (however much my father denies it), I remember all the insults and shouting as if it occurred hours rather than weeks and months ago, so it makes it that much harder to move beyond. In addition, all the signs are any attempt to re-establish contact from my side will be seen as me admitting I was wrong and apparently giving them the green light to harangue me further in an attempt to direct my life in every aspect. To accept that is to give up any standing as an adult and to accept the view that I am incapable of living my own life and making my own decisions. I do not know what their motives are but clearly they seem to be very far from any kind of love. For practical reasons, I have to maintain contact with my father, but unfortunately it comes at a high price. However, I have no such connection with my brother and I anticipate that the last time I will see him is at my father's funeral.
What struck me was the how alarmed my friend's mother was about us going to the wedding on foot and by bicycle. It was in the middle of the sunny day, in suburban Surrey, not really a scenario that you feel has a high level of risk. We were going to a wedding rather than a bare-knuckle boxing match and yet she seemed to believe that we would necessarily come to harm and tried to persuade her two sons to not attend. They had known the groom since early childhood, yet she seemed to weigh her concern about their welfare above any thought of manners. Both the men decided to go against their mother's wishes. Of course, we all got there safely and had a very nice day all round. We drank at the reception but no-one was incapacitated and we came home by taxi and bicycle.
That incident was a minor if peculiar one. What I did not really take on at the time was what it signalled about how parents handle their adult children. At 24, I have been a writer with a growing reputation; I could have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway Station; I could have been in the Army, being shot at in Iraq; I could have been in prison; I could have had a wife and children of my own; I could have been running a business; I could have owned a house. Okay, so I had not done any of these things. I was, however, training to be a teacher, which suggested that the state, a school and numerous parents saw me as sufficiently adult to teach a class of pupils, up to 18 years of age. I was fortunate that after I started the course, I only had to spend another few weeks when looking for a flat in London, living with my parents, so, perhaps I escaped being treated like my friend and his brother, somehow as if we were frozen at the age of 15 forever more.
Part of the problem in the UK is that accommodation is so expensive. When you have businesspeople looking for rooms to rent as lodgers in houses, how can a young person working in a shop or a call centre able to get even space in a shared house. The only answer is parents. This is why the average age for people leaving home in the UK is now 36, an age when back in the 1960s you would have been expected not only to have your own place (rented or otherwise) but also a wife and children, and be on the verge of middle age.
I think the attitude of parents to their adult children is not only shaped by the economic necessities of trying to live in the UK. We live in a far more juvenilised society than even the 1990s, let alone the 1960s. People seem unwilling to take responsibility for any of their actions and baulk against anyone limiting what they do; the speeding issue is a case in point, huge credit card bills is another. Thus, parents who grew up in an earlier era (and remember someone born in 1981 is now 30), when people had to take more responsibility for their actions see their children ill-equipped. However, ironically, that is because we have all been hammered by media pressure to protect our children for the apparently ominpresent threats out there. By fearing all that might happen to our children we actually make them unable to cope when anything out of the ordinary, let alone genuinely dangerous occurs to them. In addition, by padding them from the hazards of the world, we give them a false illusion that they face no risks and that driving dangerously or spending without thought will never have any serious consequences, or certainly not ones that the parents cannot resolve.
Naturally, I am sure, many children like the extension of the adult safety net. This approach can be condemned as being a middle class attitude, but you only have to meet with families in poor parts of London or any other city to see, in fact, even among those on the minimum wage and on benefits this attitude of trying to insulate adult children from the world persists. I have seen parents divide up their own bedrooms so their grown up children can continue to live in the house. I have seen women go round to the houses of their daughters' boyfriends and shout at them from the street to stay away, often as a result of cross-racial relationships. You might argue that the motive here is that the poorer population know how really hard life can be; the middle classes just want to protect their children against the potential of having a hard life. The motives may vary, but the outcome is pretty much the same: treating adult children as if they were frozen in their teenaged years.
I suppose it is natural to perceive family members at a certain fixed position. You do not see your parents as they age. You see them everyday when they are growing up and these days when middle age seems to start when you are sixty, and people in their forties wear teenage fashions, your parents look much the same from 30 to 50 and sometimes beyond; my parents in their 70s look better than they did 20 years ago, the pressures of work having been shed from them. It is the same with your grandparents you tend to fix them at a certain age and forever remember them as that and it can be a shock to realise as an adult that they are 25 years older than when you first knew them. The trouble comes when we associate certain modes of behaviour with the age we have fixed our family member at. It can be hard as your parents' faculties begin to fade as they age because you probably still default to thinking of them how they were at 45 rather than 75. You are usually quickly brought back to reality when you see them again; it can be sad, but you generally adapt and begin quite easily to treat your parents the way you used to treat your grandparents.
The problem is that they too have frozen you in time. In my experience they tend to think you are somewhere between 15-17. You look like an adult to them, but they know that in fact you are very inexperienced of the world and are likely to make mistakes. You have to be warned about these things. Whilst you may resemble an adult, in their eyes, in fact you lack the ability to make adult judgements and you will make lots of mistakes. You can be talked to as if you have no knowledge or expertise or experience of the world, no matter how high-flying a post you might hold (especially if it is an industry your parents disapprove of or never felt was right for you) or how many lovers you might have. I must say, that in fact, this perception is not limited to parents. Back in 2002, my brother and I got into an argument in a Belgian street. He started bellowing at me about incidents that had occurred when I was 15 and he was 13, i.e. back in 1982. Since then the Cold War has ended, AIDS has been a global problem, apartheid has ended in South Africa, home computers had grown from 48k to many Mb capacity, we had been through years of Thatcher and Blair, and yet, he still saw the tensions between us as they had been as teenagers.
Maybe I am unlucky, I do seem to meet people who whilst not having shining careers themselves are surprised that everyone else is not more successful and again blame laziness. I had one friend who could not understand why I was not studying Korean (he would allow me to learn Japanese at a pinch) and was not making thousands of pounds writing history articles for magazines. He had no understanding that these things do not happen. The number of Britons who can understand Korean must be very limited and even those who are successful at article writing (and they are a select band who get lucky breaks) never earn the sums he assumed. He took his assumptions to be the truth, so any argument against him just showed up how cunningly lazy you were, trying to get out of easy ways to make money. It is people like this who must have been the witchfinders of previous centuries.
As you can guess, at 43, I am still facing the 'frozen in time' kind of attitude from both my brother and my parents. It has been exacerbated by me being unemployed for 12 months. Despite decades of mass unemployment, the default attitude for British people is that being unemployed is the fault of the jobless person; the economy and the attitudes of employers have nothing to do with it. If only the jobless person applies him/herself, then they will not be without work.
Being unemployed seems to give everyone a licence to tell you how to live your life, not least your parents. However, the advice is not restricted to job hunting. I have a girlfriend, she is the same race as me and the same religion. She is aged 5 years younger than me. She has a child that is not mine. She is not an alcoholic, she is not a drug addict, she is not involved in any criminal activity, she is not violent, she runs her own retail business. However, the attitudes of my father and brother towards her are as if she was stealing from me on a daily basis or plunging me in crime. I cannot stand people who stop members of their family linking up with people of a different race or religion, though I can understand the basis of their disapproval. Yet, in my case, there is not even this excuse. I could understand even if she was 20 years younger than me or 20 years older, but we seem to be very well matched, and vitally, makes me happy.
What gives parents and other family members the right to police the relationships that other adults in their family have? I would be frustrated if I had been 16 or 18 and was told I should not be seeing someone I was attracted to, let alone one I loved and who loves me back, and treats me incredibly well. How come, in our 30s and 40s, we cannot be left alone to form the relationships we want and maintain them, especially when they are as positive as the one I am in at present? I am now old enough to have potentially had grandchildren myself and yet I am treated by my family as if I am still not mature enough to run my life. I think it is somewhat an issue of discrimination against particular members of the family. As it took me many years before I had sex and did not keep my family informed about every short-term relationship I had; because my girlfriend had a child by a man who fled the country once it was conceived, both of us have been branded by our families as feckless and incapable of making our own decisions. This seems ironic considering that I have managed offices controlling thousands of pounds and my girlfriend runs her own business. Yet, clearly this is not enough to warrant us being treated like adults.
If these people were not family members I would have told them to back off very harshly and in fact, as it is, the persistence of my father and brother in trying to keep running my life has led me to break ties with them both. The picking on one member of a family seems common. My girlfriend has two sisters, one of whom is also a single parent. I have my brother who does not get treated the way I do, despite the fact for many years he settled to no career and spent months travelling, getting drunk and stoned, but now somehow is allowed to be an adult when I am not.
One friend of mine when living at home in his 20s was compelled to do the ironing and other domestic chores that his brother, only two years younger, was not compelled to do. His brother, having attended university was deemed to be above those things, yet has flitted from job to job, entered a marriage in which the woman two-timed him even moving her lover into their house and drained him of money before emigrating with yet another lover. It appears that some of us are marked out as 'black sheep' for our entire lives, on criteria which, objectively, would not suggest such labelling. It means that no matter how old we become we are never free of being treated as if we are incapable of running our lives without active family intervention. If I was an alcoholic, a drug addict, regularly in prison, then I could understand it. My own crimes have been being unemployed and falling in love with a single mother.
I had a friend who married in the late 1990s to a stunningly intelligent and beautiful woman. He was well-educated and had movie star looks. They shared a love of travelling to remote places and living adventurously. However, both had very good university jobs, were healthy, of the same age and were not involved in crime or addicted to drugs or alcohol. They seemed very well suited. Yet, from the start her parents disapproved of him and hounded the couple so much that they fled the UK for Belgium. Ultimately the pressure was such that they divorced. To me, given how rare happiness is in this world, to drive a couple that way seemed evil. Alright, there may have been a personality clash, but once your child is an adult you have to accept their choices. Destroying something that brings them happiness without harm, is perverse. However, I guess that these parents are not only frozen in time but also cannot see beyond their own petty concerns.
I have no idea who sets the rules. I have had one male friend who has been physically abused by one girlfriend and robbed from by another; I have one female friend who is always publicly disparaged by her husband, and yet no-one ever seems to speak out or criticise what is going on with them. Clearly myself and my girlfriend are in some category which allows people to tell us how to live our lives. Before coming to visit us, her father told her bluntly that she had to leave me. There was no reason given. I accept I am unemployed, but then are hundreds of thousands of men in the UK. I worked hard to try to get a job and having been to 28 interviews in 12 months, I finally secured work. It may not be the greatest job I could have got, it pays £7000 per year less than I received in my last post, but it is permanent, it uses my skills and those things are not to be ignored in the current economic climate.
I have never attacked my girlfriend (I have never attacked anyone) and am like a father to her child. We argue far less than is the apparent national average despite me spending the bulk of the day with her. I am not a drug addict, an alcoholic or a criminal. I do all that I can to make her and her child happy. Yet, it is not enough, she has been told repeatedly to leave me as I have been told repeatedly to leave her. There is no sense that I am an adult, that I can make my own decisions, make my own mistakes indeed, and live with the consequences. I cannot predict the future. Looking back there was little I could have done to spare myself from redundancy. Yet, somehow, I am expected to have prescient powers that would have allowed me in the 1980s to know what careers and which employers within those careers would be safe bets in the 2000s.
Remaining with my girlfriend then opens me up to further charges (and she has experienced very similar on her side from her father), that I am naive, that I have no idea what I am doing and need to be guided. Mistakes dating back decades are raked up for both of us. For me it is joblessness, for her it is having a child as a single parent, that seem to be the clinchers, the things that rule out us being able to shape our lives properly or to make decisions. I am not even permitted to say I am going for a test for Asperger's (let alone doing it) without being ridiculed at length by my father.
I am a man, I have run offices, I have made financial decisions, I am trusted by the state to drive on the roads, to vote, to pay taxes, to obey the law, yet I am not deemed capable of taking decisions on my own health and above all on my own relationships. My girlfriend and I have been utterly loyal to each other, we have had no other sexual partners since being together and yet our parents see the other as being reckless and bad for their child. If they knew how hard it is to find someone who you are compatible with, I would hope that they would be pleased for us that we have managed to find someone who makes us happy. Even if my girlfriend had all those bad characteristics, it would be up to me and her to decide whether the relationship should continue.
We have been facing so much anyway, that I would just beg for her and my family members, if they cannot tolerate the partner we have chosen, just to stay quiet. If you cannot say something nice, say nothing at all is what I would say. However, any attempt to get them to back off elicits even more patronising criticism from both sides that even at ages 43 and 38, we are not capable of making our own choices and have to have parental intervention to show us where we have gone so wrong.
Parenting is not about ensuring that your children live their lives very precisely the way you have set out, even if that was possible (and, of course, parents, whatever they might think, are fallible; my father lent me money so I did not have to pull out of the house purchase and now says, three years on, that that was a big mistake on his part and I should have continued renting). Parenting is about equipping your children to deal with the world out there and what it might throw at them. Yes, you will act as a fall back, a safety net as far as you can, for many years. However, once your child is an adult you have to recognise that the state views them sufficiently mature to do all the things like vote, have sex, die for their country, go to prison, whatever and live with the consequences. You may disagree with how they live their lives, but if they are happy and are not making other people unhappy, it is not your place to intervene.
You can never control another person's life, even your partner's and to try to do so ends in bitterness and failure. As a result of my brother and father and my girlfriend's father constantly haranguing us to end the relationship, we feel large chunks of our families have turned their back on us.
Men take it harder than women which is why I have ceased contact with my brother and father over their repeated criticism of my relationship. Ironically, my girlfriend keeps trying to get me to make it up with them. However, being an Asperger's sufferer (however much my father denies it), I remember all the insults and shouting as if it occurred hours rather than weeks and months ago, so it makes it that much harder to move beyond. In addition, all the signs are any attempt to re-establish contact from my side will be seen as me admitting I was wrong and apparently giving them the green light to harangue me further in an attempt to direct my life in every aspect. To accept that is to give up any standing as an adult and to accept the view that I am incapable of living my own life and making my own decisions. I do not know what their motives are but clearly they seem to be very far from any kind of love. For practical reasons, I have to maintain contact with my father, but unfortunately it comes at a high price. However, I have no such connection with my brother and I anticipate that the last time I will see him is at my father's funeral.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
Remembering the Bullies
One effect of having a 7-year old child resident in your house is that the things he is experiencing often trigger of memories of events in your own life. I am not entering into the debate around 'false memories' and abuse, but I am going to look at how hearing about bullying of this child has often brought back memories of (unpleasant) things that happened to me, that I had somehow compacted and stored away in a part of my brain where I tend not to go. I was not abused in my childhood, but my father was harsh, sometimes for a few moments violent and certainly often frightening. My mother often humiliated me, but in a way which I think was motivated by what she felt was the right thing to do though it has left scars that have remained for decades. This is partly as I have a real phobia of humiliation not only for myself but for others whether real people or even fictional ones, so I imagine that these things have lingered longer for me than they would for the bulk of the population.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Bullying of school aged children is very common, though it is taken far more seriously than it used to be. The number of children bullied at some time in their school career (ages 4-16) is around 44%. Of course the duration and the severity of the bullying varies and 16 children in the UK kill themselves each year as the result of bullying. Bullying has become far more sophisticated and it is far harder to escape it as bullies use texts and the internet to get at other children. Interestingly 71% of children have said that they have been a bully themselves at some time in their school life. I suppose this is human nature as often the bullied will find an outlet in picking on someone else. Bullying has a wide range and can be psychological and/or physical. None of us likes to be humiliated or teased but it is especially painful when you are growing up and are facing challenges and may lack self-confidence and self-esteem anyway.
With the child in my house being both bullied and a bully, fortunately in what seems like short-lived incidents that as yet do not seem to have had a long-term impact on his life, I have been reminded of things in my life from childhood up into my thirties when I have been bullied. What I have come to realise is that I have segmented each incident and so have not seen it as a long problem, rather a short-term thing. However, now I look back there seem very few years between the ages of 5-19 in which I was not suffering some form of bullying. Bullying was handled very poorly in the 1970s and 1980s (and of course before then), and I am glad that schools pay far more attention to it now in all its forms and have policies and teaching in place rather than simply dismissing it as a natural part (or in many cases in the UK, especially in private schools, as a necessary part) of growing up. My parents' reaction was simply to tell me I acted as 'a natural victim' that my behaviour simply egged on bullies. They offered no solution to this but simply added to the humiliation by saying I walked and spoke like someone with a mental defect which was hardly going to help. Many teenage boys are gangly and their voices are altering, they want to be told that that is part of adolescence not made to feel that they are somehow peculiar because that is often what the bullies try to do anyway; you do not need it from your parents too.
There were lots of bases on which I suffered bullying. I am a white male who grew up in a middle-class area of the UK so you would imagine I would have had a privileged life and little on which to discriminate against me, but bullies will always find something. At primary school I was told by people that they could not associate with me because I came from the wrong side of the town not the exclusive estate. I was told that our house was too small and we did no have the necessary consumer items to be considered worthy friends, namely a brand new car and a colour television. Teachers were often complicit in these sorts of things being very critical of children they did not feel fitted the norm. I was removed from doing a reading in a school assembly because I pronounced the word 'a' as in 'a town' or whatever as 'ay' rather than 'ah' which was apparently the correct way. I wonder what they would have done if someone from northern or western England had come to the school, probably put them into 'remedial' classes as they were called, to give them the 'correct' pronunciation.
There were other biases. I was told that because I had not been Christened people could call me by any name they chose, because my name was odd anyway. I also apparently looked wrong. I did not like football which meant that I was excluded from the bulk of schoolboy activities and discussion and would actually be ordered off the pitch during PE lessons as the team would rather play with 10 players than have me on their side. My friends tended to be the other marginalised people and even girls, which was odd in those days. Once I was old enough I spent my break times in the school library and though I was once assaulted by two boys in a public library at the age of 12, I was generally safe in the school library.
So there was a lot of name calling but there was physical attacks too. I remember when I was eight being pinned to the ground by two older boys for some reason I do not know why. They found a piece of steel that looked like a guillotine blade (the school was very run down and had lots of disused buildings on the site full of debris, these days it would have been closed on health and safety grounds, but this was 1975) which they pressed against my neck and forced gravel into my mouth. At least they were forced to write an apology but they caught me walking home one day (they walked up my street to get to theirs) and the stronger one gripped me by the neck and lifted me off the floor causing immense pain, so the apology letters had been a small, short-lived victory. I remember a particular bully called Ian Johnstone (I imagine he is long dead by now as though he would only have been 41, I first saw him smoking at the age of 7) who simply walked up to me one day and thrust his knee into my genitals and laughed as I writhed in pain telling me I was clearly so weak as not to be able to stand up to such an attack. There was the usual tripping (sometimes in a very sophisticated way I was once caught out by a set of bolas that a boy had made by linking three conkers on string together and deftly throwing them so they caught around my legs sending me sprawling to the floor).
A lot of the bullying was fostered by parents most of whom earned good incomes, had all the latest consumer items, somehow felt they worked hard and were better than those who did now work in offices and that they were tough and their children had to be tough too. Their toughness had nothing about going hiking or being physically fit, it was about being callous. You can certainly see the seeds of Thatcherism in the middle class areas of the mid-1970s. Her nastiness fitted in perfectly with this class that defined success by ownership rather than experience and strength by how selfish you could be. They were the heirs of the mill owners of the 19th century but lacking even the business sense and willingness to put in effort that those ancestors had.
At secondary school things were marginally easier because I spent all my time hidden in the library though I was punched there once. Playgrounds were more crowded so there was no room for football anyway. I was poor at sports but as more of the 'cool' boys smoked increasingly I came in with better results as they began to struggle as we aged. I was fortunate that two of the sports teachers also taught History my best subject so they forgave me a lot and fortunately, but the mid-1980s were aware more of the range of abilities and gave me marks for effort in sport even when I came in last. A bigger school with some pupils who were disabled meant people could not have the narrow criteria they had set at my primary school. Of course it did not stop the teasing and things, but if I went straight from class to the library and back to class I could avoid a lot of it. I was punched once by a girl of my age simply because she felt I had got in her way when coming into a classroom. At 14 I suffered a cosmetic illness and to some extent it got me off the hook as even the thugs of the school appreciated how I had got through it and it stopped them shouting at me in the playground or asking me why my school trousers were so baggy (this was the early 1980s and all trousers had to be tight) or why I had no girlfriend. Other people, however, ironically not the usual thugs, felt they had a green light to slap me round the head and this would happen as I was filing through crowds.
There was still some of the stuff about not having all the consumer items from the very Thatcherite children, but now in a far bigger school (1200 pupils) there was a much wider mix of social class and so they had to tread carefully. It was only years later when talking with a friend who had gone to school in backwater parts of Scotland in the 1980s where she as a English girl faced constant incomprehension from staff and pupils because of her accent, that I realised that even the 'poor' children at my school were far better off than the average. All the parents owned homes, there were no tenants and all had cars. I suppose any microcosm of society sets its own parameters even if these are out of step with the entirety of that society.
I suppose I was quite fortunate, despite my feelings to the contrary at the time, that my illness stopped a lot of the bullying I had experienced. Unpleasant teachers trod more softly with me as well rather than their previous chastising manner. Humiliation seemed stock in trade in those days and I think I have mentioned Mrs. Williams, Mr. Callen and Mr. Salmon in postings before. In particular, Callen moderated his approach; Williams always had new targets to pick on anyway. Once I went to Sixth Form College, what is now Years 12 and 13 (and I in fact did Year 14 too) I was in a neighbouring town with only a few people I knew. You might have thought at that age 16-18, bullying would be left behind as juvenile. I did get misplaced sympathy from people, who, because of my illness thought I was dying and were surprised to meet me again in my twenties. However, some people still indulged in out-and-out bullying, unfortunately one being the boy I was put next to in my History class, a Eurasian called Rishaad who ridicule my clothes incessantly (he came from a wealthy family and always had the latest fashion) and when I did not rise to his bait (by now being well schooled in avoiding bullies' jibes) he would simply punch me as a bit of warming up before the class started. Of course the time I pushed (rather than punched back) he pretended to be very upset and got the teacher involved saying I was discriminating against him. Given all the bullying I had sustained up to now and the ongoing criticism of my parents, I spend these years very unhappy and this led to a vicious circle of low self-esteem and thinking (as I had done in the latter years of secondary school) that any woman asking me out was trying to pull off a trick or was at best mistaken.
University life was not too bad, though I lived in a very strait-laced corridor in my first year and because I was not Christian and because I was anti-Thatcher I was seen as an oddity rather than something to be bullied. At university there is always a huge diversity of people you can usually find someone in the same situation. In the second year, when living in a rented house, the landlord's step-daughter also a student was incredibly bullying. There was unresolved tension between daughter and step-father who seemed to despise her and made her sleep in the house when there was a whole wall missing. She was very arrogant and blamed anything that went wrong on her fellow flatmates, for example the collapse of the 1970s sofa despite the fact that she and her boyfriend used to pet on it one on top of the other whereas the rest of us simply sat there one at a time. She felt she had a right to stand right in front of the television while ironing so blocking the view for everyone else and constantly whining about everything I did. I suppose that was not bullying but it was an unpleasant atmosphere.
I have spoken about the bullying that I experienced while in my last job, a terrible invasive bullying by a colleague. It is interesting that like a number of the bullies he had a real sense of self-righteousness that somehow I was in the wrong and he was behaving precisely normally. He set out to prevent me getting any recognition for any work I did claiming he inspired anything of value that happened in the office. He also expressed amazement when managers trod softly around him, wondering why they thought they might upset him. There was the 'moral' thing too, as a robust Christian he could not tolerate the pattern of life he assumed that I lived, whereas in reality it was boringly sober and asexual. My manager lived in a fantasy world of her own creation and could not tolerate anyone who said anything that did not tally with her perceptions of how the world worked. Despite direct appeals to her she would not accept that bullying was taking place. I only recognised the severity of it when the man in question left for another job, saying incredibly arrogantly that he felt his work there was done. He did, though, come back some years later and it must have been a nightmare when he returned saying something along the lines that he understood the company needed the benefit of his skills.
Having kept a diary every day since 1st January 1978, I know that my memories of bullying are not false, they are real. As I see the boy in my house experience some of the same things, these memories are coming unpacked and each course of bullying has numerous humiliating or painful incidents that made up the whole experience of that bout of harrassment. For a great deal of my life I have experienced bullying and it really retarded my emotional growth and made me feel worthless for so many years. It took some wonderful people to lift me out of that situation and even then I can still be sucked into being bullied by the more sophisticated methods colleagues use. What equated effectively to collaboration between my parents, teachers, colleagues and managers with the bullies made it harder. I have managed to pull out of it, even though it has taken many years. However, for many people, especially children the scarring of bullying often runs deep and can destroy what would otherwise have been a fulfilling life. This stuff is too unpleasant to want to make up.
P.P. 03/01/2010: Having read of a new two-part television drama of 'The Day of the Triffids' shown over the recent Christmas period on BBC1, I was reminded of the last time the BBC produced an adaptation of this story. It was shown in April 1981 and starred John Duttine. Like many young people (I was 13 at the time), impressed by the series, which naturally fitted the apocalyptic feel of that time (with the threat of nuclear holocaust a regular topic of discussion on television and even in schools) I went in search of the original novel. My school had two libraries, one old one which held the non-fiction books and then a paperback library run by one of the younger English teachers which was only open at lunchtimes. I was a member of both and went to the paperback library and found a 1960s copy of the story which I proceeded to borrow. A younger girl had also wanted it but by the time she arrived, I was waiting in the queue to check it out, but she insisted that I gave it to her. I refused so she simply kicked me very forcefully in the small of my back (she had braced herself against a desk, this library being housed in a classroom) throwing me forward against the check out desk. She had a gruff lightly freckled face, fair hair cut in a common short Eighties style and though a year below me, was little smaller than me. The teacher did not understand what was happening and assumed I had stumbled. The girl simply glared at me, expecting me now to give her the book, but I checked it out and left in real pain. It turned out my father had a copy of the book anyway and I returned the school copy on Monday. What came back to me so sharply was, however, the girl's assumption, in many ways, twenty years ahead of its time, that she should have anything she wanted, no-one else's interests mattered and that violence was a matter of course if demands were not met. She did not bully me in the way the others have done, but she was certainly symptomatic of the kind of culture that sees bullying as something of strength and in fact is uncomprehending/intolerant of anything that stands in the way of that particular moment's desire.
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Never (Even Temporarily) Be A Father
Back in July 2008, I warned men about the hazards of becoming a father and advised that any sane man avoid doing it. To some extent circumstances have led me to go against my precept, but the outcome has simply reinforced my feelings on this issue. There may be some men out there who can be a father, though I think they are fewer in number than those men who think they can be a father, hence why so many men leave relationships when their children have not yet become adults. Regular readers of this blog know my domestic set up: there is me; a woman acts as kind of housekeeper whilst running her business from the property and there is her 7-year old son. Despite no legal grounds the boy often perceives me as a father figure. Despite the multiplicity of shapes of families these days it is incredible how children still expect some 1950s-style family. He goes to a Christian school so perhaps they teach that that is how families 'should' be (they teach Creationism too) and he has latched on to me as the missing piece to complete the jigsaw puzzle of a 'proper' family.
Despite having lived as a single parent for over three years the woman seems to totally underestimate the difficulties of raising a child alone. I do not think this is an exclusively female perspective nor than all women are good at raising children, some clearly are not. However, it is a very difficult job filled with constant stress even when the child is safely packed off to school. The woman has gone to the USA for about 17 days and convinced me that I could look after her child while she was away. These days schools are very strict about taking children out in term time and the school just pointed out that a child away for 10 days, i.e. two school weeks, would only attain an attendance level of 95.6% whereas the target for the school is 96.4%! For fear of losing a contributor to the mortgage at a time of such housing depression I complied. That was the worst mistake I have made in a long time and regular readers of this blog will know I am very good at making bad mistakes. She left on Thursday and we are now at Tuesday and the stress is causing real health issues. I have pain down my left side, my head feels like it is in a clamp, my breathing is laboured and there is so much acid in my stomach that I have retched close to vomiting already this morning.
Children of 7 have set patterns that they are unwilling to break even when circumstances have changed. You cannot get them to understand that they cannot continue behaving the way they do when Mummy is around when she is not around. If I could have done I should have taken leave for this whole period as holding down a job 30-46 miles (depending on which office I am in that day) from where the child is schooled makes things difficult. I pleaded with my employer (which is supposedly family-friendly) to not have things scheduled to clash with school times and they simply did the opposite. In addition, one department has kept setting meetings at short notice and moving them around as if we are all entirely flexible. To cope with the situation I have been compelled to use a childminder but it is very difficult if I have to keep ringing her up to say, do not collect the child this afternoon as the meeting is off, but could she do it on Thursday and then ringing back the next day to say, now Thursday is off, it is back to Wednesday. I know single parents cope with this kind of stuff all the time, but I imagine most do not work full-time in the next city along.
I lack the authority of a genuine parent, I accept that, so I am left with cajoling, bribing, threatening withholding of treats and simply begging to get the child to comply. I am effectively sharing a house with a 65-year old Classics professor, he is so pedantic and insistent that everything is done 'just so'. There is no room for variation. I imagine I would be a bad candidate for someone caring for an elderly person too. I have not even begun to explore that type of caring. I suppose I could just let the child do what it wants, stay up all night and live on crisps for 17 days, but I worry the school will then get upset and complain. His school is unwilling to act in loco parentis on any occasion (e.g. when the child is vomiting they simply stick him/her in the corridor and shriek down the telephone for the parent to come and collect the child no matter what they might be doing), but is happy to police what it feels is wrong at home. The lack of compliance with what seems even a sensible suggestion got me to such a state last night that I was tempted to telephone social services and get the child taken into foster care saying his mother had skipped off across the Atlantic, which, in fact is the truth. Selfishly, though doing that would mean the end of the mortgage payments from her and me having to move for the fifth time in four years. Of course if this stressful situation leads me to a heart attack then that will have to occur anyway, so it might be just a matter of time. There are 11 days still to go and a lot could happen in that time.
Anyway, men, learn from me. Do not let yourself be tricked into looking after a child for more than a few hours. It is a near impossible task especially as you are having to start from scratch with the child and they will fight tooth and nail to adhere to their normal day-to-day pattern as well as trying to see how far they can push you. If you find yourself in such a situation and are not trapped by financial arrangements, blame the mother for desertion and hand the child over to social services, they are trained for dealing with these things, you are not.
P.P. 22/01/2009, my health was deteriorating as a result of my blood pressure rocketing due to looking after the child. My head felt like it was in a vice, my breathing was laboured and I had pain all down my left side. My emailed demand to the woman to return from the USA led her to send her sister immediately to collect the child and he has gone away to stay with her. The woman is furious that I have failed in my duty and is trying to fly back early though this is proving difficult due to the Obama effect. Naturally she is equally angry that I have wrecked her holiday. I was in an impossible situation from the start, if I had tried to stop her going there would have been complaints (there are anyway now that I have asked her to come back) that I was restricting her life. Equally I am not physically or emotionally able to raised a child on my own, and I had said this all along.
Despite having lived as a single parent for over three years the woman seems to totally underestimate the difficulties of raising a child alone. I do not think this is an exclusively female perspective nor than all women are good at raising children, some clearly are not. However, it is a very difficult job filled with constant stress even when the child is safely packed off to school. The woman has gone to the USA for about 17 days and convinced me that I could look after her child while she was away. These days schools are very strict about taking children out in term time and the school just pointed out that a child away for 10 days, i.e. two school weeks, would only attain an attendance level of 95.6% whereas the target for the school is 96.4%! For fear of losing a contributor to the mortgage at a time of such housing depression I complied. That was the worst mistake I have made in a long time and regular readers of this blog will know I am very good at making bad mistakes. She left on Thursday and we are now at Tuesday and the stress is causing real health issues. I have pain down my left side, my head feels like it is in a clamp, my breathing is laboured and there is so much acid in my stomach that I have retched close to vomiting already this morning.
Children of 7 have set patterns that they are unwilling to break even when circumstances have changed. You cannot get them to understand that they cannot continue behaving the way they do when Mummy is around when she is not around. If I could have done I should have taken leave for this whole period as holding down a job 30-46 miles (depending on which office I am in that day) from where the child is schooled makes things difficult. I pleaded with my employer (which is supposedly family-friendly) to not have things scheduled to clash with school times and they simply did the opposite. In addition, one department has kept setting meetings at short notice and moving them around as if we are all entirely flexible. To cope with the situation I have been compelled to use a childminder but it is very difficult if I have to keep ringing her up to say, do not collect the child this afternoon as the meeting is off, but could she do it on Thursday and then ringing back the next day to say, now Thursday is off, it is back to Wednesday. I know single parents cope with this kind of stuff all the time, but I imagine most do not work full-time in the next city along.
I lack the authority of a genuine parent, I accept that, so I am left with cajoling, bribing, threatening withholding of treats and simply begging to get the child to comply. I am effectively sharing a house with a 65-year old Classics professor, he is so pedantic and insistent that everything is done 'just so'. There is no room for variation. I imagine I would be a bad candidate for someone caring for an elderly person too. I have not even begun to explore that type of caring. I suppose I could just let the child do what it wants, stay up all night and live on crisps for 17 days, but I worry the school will then get upset and complain. His school is unwilling to act in loco parentis on any occasion (e.g. when the child is vomiting they simply stick him/her in the corridor and shriek down the telephone for the parent to come and collect the child no matter what they might be doing), but is happy to police what it feels is wrong at home. The lack of compliance with what seems even a sensible suggestion got me to such a state last night that I was tempted to telephone social services and get the child taken into foster care saying his mother had skipped off across the Atlantic, which, in fact is the truth. Selfishly, though doing that would mean the end of the mortgage payments from her and me having to move for the fifth time in four years. Of course if this stressful situation leads me to a heart attack then that will have to occur anyway, so it might be just a matter of time. There are 11 days still to go and a lot could happen in that time.
Anyway, men, learn from me. Do not let yourself be tricked into looking after a child for more than a few hours. It is a near impossible task especially as you are having to start from scratch with the child and they will fight tooth and nail to adhere to their normal day-to-day pattern as well as trying to see how far they can push you. If you find yourself in such a situation and are not trapped by financial arrangements, blame the mother for desertion and hand the child over to social services, they are trained for dealing with these things, you are not.
P.P. 22/01/2009, my health was deteriorating as a result of my blood pressure rocketing due to looking after the child. My head felt like it was in a vice, my breathing was laboured and I had pain all down my left side. My emailed demand to the woman to return from the USA led her to send her sister immediately to collect the child and he has gone away to stay with her. The woman is furious that I have failed in my duty and is trying to fly back early though this is proving difficult due to the Obama effect. Naturally she is equally angry that I have wrecked her holiday. I was in an impossible situation from the start, if I had tried to stop her going there would have been complaints (there are anyway now that I have asked her to come back) that I was restricting her life. Equally I am not physically or emotionally able to raised a child on my own, and I had said this all along.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Never Become A Father
Yesterday I read an open letter in the 'Family' section of 'The Guardian' from a mother of three children to them and also to their father who committed suicide ten years ago. Reading it reinforced my view that single-parent families are the only model that can adequately prepare children for life in the UK in the 21st century. Though all the children who are now 21, 17 and 16 have had the usual run-ins with some self-harm and contact with drugs, they are all now prospering and pursuing a range of interests and careers, they have not become homeless junkies. I imagine the same would have been much the same if their father had stayed alive. He would have been in no better position to stop them doing bad things to themselves than the mother has been. In fact especially for the two boys, the 21 and 16 year olds, antagonism with their father may have driven them to behave more hostilely and destructively than their brief flirtations with things have done. I think this is a classic example of a riposte to the group 'Familes Need Fathers', proof is stacking up that they do not at all.
Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.
In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.
Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.
I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.
There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.
P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.
Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.
In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.
Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.
I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.
There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.
P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.
Sunday, 23 March 2008
People Should Need a Licence to Have a Child
I have been reading today that schools are encountering ever greater problems with children who constantly throw tantrums because they cannot get what they want or are told they have to do something they are not keen on. This is very baby-like behaviour and by school age it is anticipated that children should have grown out of such approaches. Problems for the schools are exacerbated by parents treating their children like spoilt princes(-esses) and even getting violent with teachers if they dare criticise their darlings. Now we have a lot of things going on here that I have touched on before. One is the madly consumerist society that we live in the UK in which people equate happiness with the newest and most exciting consumption. This goes for adults as well as children, hence the massive debt so many Britons are in and children with more toys, clothes, food than they know what to do with and yet retaining a desire for yet more. The people who are parents of primary school now were predominantly born between 1968-88 so lived in a time of consumption but of less scale than now and certainly without the huge range of electrical items and all the tie-in products, twenty channels to watch and so on. All parents through history raise their own children the way they were raised, but in the past two decades society has advanced far more in terms of temptations and expectations than it ever did say 1948-68 or 1968-88. When I started school in 1972 we were still using books printed on rationed paper during the Second World War. Now children feel deprived if they lack an interactive whiteboard in their classroom.
The second thing is that in the UK there is a sense that one's business is no-one else's business even if it impinges on them. People get angry if you tell them to slow down when driving or to put their mobile phone away, or whatever. They believe in an ultimate right to do what they want to do without challenge even when it puts other people's lives at risk and certainly when it 'only' disrupts the learning of other children in the class. Of course not all the blame can be laid at parents. England in particular keeps examining its childern at age of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18 and in common with the rest of the UK, since 1992 has had a very rigid curriculum. So, it is not surprising that children are bored and stressed by staggering from preparation for one exam to the next.
Now a few years back I saw a programme which tried to provoke debate and one week they suggested that children should be considered a luxury item and rather than parents being given child support and other benefits they should actually be taxed for the additional burden they were putting on the state in terms of healthcare and education costs. In the last decade the pattern of childbirth has shifted in this direction with birthrate falling among working class people as it does become too expensive to have children and rising among middle class people as they seek a justification (however weak) for driving a 4 x 4 and they started getting lots more maternity and paternity leave. Children still make up the majority of people living below the poverty line, but the large poor family is steadily dying out.
The key problem seems to be now, not so much whether people have the money or not to raise a child. Estimates for the cost are somewhere between £50,000-£130,000 (€66,500-€72,990; US$101,000- US$262,200) spent on raising a child from ages 0-18. You can add on £13,000 if they do a 3-year course at university and children. In addition the cost of housing means the average child will be living with their parents into their mid-30s even if they go away for some time for study, they will be unable to earn sufficient to live away for many years. So children are expensive. The key problem, though, is that the bulk of people who have children have no experience or training in how to look after them. If you want to work as a childminder or as a foster carer you have to undergo loads of scrutiny about your background, about your health and habits (such as whether you smoke or are obese). If you want to adopt a child you again have to be thoroughly scrutinised (they will look at if your marriage is going to last) and go through a probationary period with the child before they become yours. Yet if you create a child yourself no-one checks up on whether you are competent to raise them.
We know a lot now about raising children in the heavily consumerist society we find ourselves in. There are books and programmes all over the place to teach you how, just no compulsion. Is it any surprise that parents get it wrong and society pays the price of the screwed up, ill-disciplined children they raise. The UK has taken some steps in the right direction, for example, the famous case of Patricia Amos, jailed in 2002 for 60 days for permitting her daughter to go truant from school. Now, I know British prisons are full but once some more have been built we need to start increasing the number of incompetent parents who are punished. Of course by the time their children are teenagers it is really too late, which is why the state has to monitor things right from shortly after conception. Now, before people say that this is an intrusion into the privacy of the family home, who is it who has to pay for all the damage and crime that unruly children commit? Not the family, but the rest of us who have no control over how the child is brought up.
How my scheme would work is that the moment a woman realised she was pregnant she would have to register the conception with the local authorities and alongside any pre-natal classes she would have to begin to attend parenting classes. If there is a father on the scene he would have to attend to. If he did not then he would be barred from living in the same house as the child when it was born. Bad fathers are an even worse problem than bad mothers especially when it comes to raising thuggish boys. This is not a class issue, spoilt upper and middle class men charging around drunk in 4x4s on their mobile phones are just as remiss as a chav petty criminal, though of course neither would see what they were doing as wrong. This comes back to the huge malaise for the UK, people unwilling to live up to their responsibilities.
The parents passing the parenting course would be granted a licence and at the birth of their child would be permitted to take it home with them. Parents who fail the course or do not attend will have the child removed from them at birth and handed to foster carers. They would have 1 year to complete the course if they wanted their child back otherwise if they failed to do so in that time the child would go for adoption. There is a huge demand for babies to adopt and of course the adopting parents would have to go through the same tests that natural parents would have to.
Relationships break up and parents then meet up with other partners. If this happened then the prospective step-mother/father would also have to be tested and receive a licence before being allowed to live in the same house and their step-children. This would stop random adults who fancy a single parent being thrust into being a parent themselves, something they may be totally incapable of doing. In addition a lot of bad experiences for children come from step-parents, so far more monitoring is needed.
Right, once everyone is licenced and has received the basic training in how to be a parent, then at anyone time they can have their licence revoked and lose the child, if they behave in an inappropriate or neglectful way. This would ease up the removal of children for difficult situations. The destination of the child could be to properly licenced grandparents or other relatives or into adoption. In addition, equivalent to, say, HGV driving licences, at the stage which the child reaches 11, the parents have to undergo teenager training as this phase is far harder than raising a child up until then and most parents have no clue how to cope with teenagers. If the parents pass then they keep the child, otherwise it spends 1 year in care and if they have not passed the test by then, it goes for adoption. You could argue that if a parent passes for one child they can retain the licence for subsequent children reaching 11, but I would advocate if there was more than a 3-year gap they be re-tested as so much develops in terms of drugs and sex and consumption in such a short period now that people need to have their skills refreshed. Of course both parents would have to pass or be barred access to the child. Too many fathers are neglectful of teenage children, especially boys and need to have their attention focused on the continued need to work with them for the sake of the family and society. In addition if teenage boys and girls see the pressure that parenting puts them under they may be dissuaded from creating children in their teens too. Of course the state can set an age limit for the licence so meaning that any child born to a pre-sixteen child would be unlicenced and go immediately into state care. Children born to girls of that age have very little future and the mothers themselves are put in an impossible position.
When my grandfather learned to drive in the 1920s you simply wrote to an office in London and applied for a driving licence which they sent to you. Nowadays the driving test is more thorough than for the bulk of the 20th century with both theory and practical tests. It is less rigorous than those of our continental neighbours and this may be why we are plagued with so many poor drivers. No-one would argue that anyone should be permitted to be allowed to drive a car without having undergone a thorough test and passed it fully. In addition, for certain vehicles like heavy goods vehicles (HGV) they have to be retested at regular intervals. Why then do we permit people to have children who can cost even more to society and do as much if not more damage without having to undergo any testing or licencing?
The second thing is that in the UK there is a sense that one's business is no-one else's business even if it impinges on them. People get angry if you tell them to slow down when driving or to put their mobile phone away, or whatever. They believe in an ultimate right to do what they want to do without challenge even when it puts other people's lives at risk and certainly when it 'only' disrupts the learning of other children in the class. Of course not all the blame can be laid at parents. England in particular keeps examining its childern at age of 7, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18 and in common with the rest of the UK, since 1992 has had a very rigid curriculum. So, it is not surprising that children are bored and stressed by staggering from preparation for one exam to the next.
Now a few years back I saw a programme which tried to provoke debate and one week they suggested that children should be considered a luxury item and rather than parents being given child support and other benefits they should actually be taxed for the additional burden they were putting on the state in terms of healthcare and education costs. In the last decade the pattern of childbirth has shifted in this direction with birthrate falling among working class people as it does become too expensive to have children and rising among middle class people as they seek a justification (however weak) for driving a 4 x 4 and they started getting lots more maternity and paternity leave. Children still make up the majority of people living below the poverty line, but the large poor family is steadily dying out.
The key problem seems to be now, not so much whether people have the money or not to raise a child. Estimates for the cost are somewhere between £50,000-£130,000 (€66,500-€72,990; US$101,000- US$262,200) spent on raising a child from ages 0-18. You can add on £13,000 if they do a 3-year course at university and children. In addition the cost of housing means the average child will be living with their parents into their mid-30s even if they go away for some time for study, they will be unable to earn sufficient to live away for many years. So children are expensive. The key problem, though, is that the bulk of people who have children have no experience or training in how to look after them. If you want to work as a childminder or as a foster carer you have to undergo loads of scrutiny about your background, about your health and habits (such as whether you smoke or are obese). If you want to adopt a child you again have to be thoroughly scrutinised (they will look at if your marriage is going to last) and go through a probationary period with the child before they become yours. Yet if you create a child yourself no-one checks up on whether you are competent to raise them.
We know a lot now about raising children in the heavily consumerist society we find ourselves in. There are books and programmes all over the place to teach you how, just no compulsion. Is it any surprise that parents get it wrong and society pays the price of the screwed up, ill-disciplined children they raise. The UK has taken some steps in the right direction, for example, the famous case of Patricia Amos, jailed in 2002 for 60 days for permitting her daughter to go truant from school. Now, I know British prisons are full but once some more have been built we need to start increasing the number of incompetent parents who are punished. Of course by the time their children are teenagers it is really too late, which is why the state has to monitor things right from shortly after conception. Now, before people say that this is an intrusion into the privacy of the family home, who is it who has to pay for all the damage and crime that unruly children commit? Not the family, but the rest of us who have no control over how the child is brought up.
How my scheme would work is that the moment a woman realised she was pregnant she would have to register the conception with the local authorities and alongside any pre-natal classes she would have to begin to attend parenting classes. If there is a father on the scene he would have to attend to. If he did not then he would be barred from living in the same house as the child when it was born. Bad fathers are an even worse problem than bad mothers especially when it comes to raising thuggish boys. This is not a class issue, spoilt upper and middle class men charging around drunk in 4x4s on their mobile phones are just as remiss as a chav petty criminal, though of course neither would see what they were doing as wrong. This comes back to the huge malaise for the UK, people unwilling to live up to their responsibilities.
The parents passing the parenting course would be granted a licence and at the birth of their child would be permitted to take it home with them. Parents who fail the course or do not attend will have the child removed from them at birth and handed to foster carers. They would have 1 year to complete the course if they wanted their child back otherwise if they failed to do so in that time the child would go for adoption. There is a huge demand for babies to adopt and of course the adopting parents would have to go through the same tests that natural parents would have to.
Relationships break up and parents then meet up with other partners. If this happened then the prospective step-mother/father would also have to be tested and receive a licence before being allowed to live in the same house and their step-children. This would stop random adults who fancy a single parent being thrust into being a parent themselves, something they may be totally incapable of doing. In addition a lot of bad experiences for children come from step-parents, so far more monitoring is needed.
Right, once everyone is licenced and has received the basic training in how to be a parent, then at anyone time they can have their licence revoked and lose the child, if they behave in an inappropriate or neglectful way. This would ease up the removal of children for difficult situations. The destination of the child could be to properly licenced grandparents or other relatives or into adoption. In addition, equivalent to, say, HGV driving licences, at the stage which the child reaches 11, the parents have to undergo teenager training as this phase is far harder than raising a child up until then and most parents have no clue how to cope with teenagers. If the parents pass then they keep the child, otherwise it spends 1 year in care and if they have not passed the test by then, it goes for adoption. You could argue that if a parent passes for one child they can retain the licence for subsequent children reaching 11, but I would advocate if there was more than a 3-year gap they be re-tested as so much develops in terms of drugs and sex and consumption in such a short period now that people need to have their skills refreshed. Of course both parents would have to pass or be barred access to the child. Too many fathers are neglectful of teenage children, especially boys and need to have their attention focused on the continued need to work with them for the sake of the family and society. In addition if teenage boys and girls see the pressure that parenting puts them under they may be dissuaded from creating children in their teens too. Of course the state can set an age limit for the licence so meaning that any child born to a pre-sixteen child would be unlicenced and go immediately into state care. Children born to girls of that age have very little future and the mothers themselves are put in an impossible position.
When my grandfather learned to drive in the 1920s you simply wrote to an office in London and applied for a driving licence which they sent to you. Nowadays the driving test is more thorough than for the bulk of the 20th century with both theory and practical tests. It is less rigorous than those of our continental neighbours and this may be why we are plagued with so many poor drivers. No-one would argue that anyone should be permitted to be allowed to drive a car without having undergone a thorough test and passed it fully. In addition, for certain vehicles like heavy goods vehicles (HGV) they have to be retested at regular intervals. Why then do we permit people to have children who can cost even more to society and do as much if not more damage without having to undergo any testing or licencing?
Friday, 8 February 2008
Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 1: My Parents
The British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) wrote the following poem (beloved of bloggers it seems) in 1974:
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
The reason why I thought of this poem was that my father turns 70 next month. In his middle-aged years he always said he wanted to take a pill on his 70th birthday and to simply fall asleep and die so that he was no longer a burden on society. I think this partly stems from the burdens elderly relatives in his and my mother's family inflicted on him in his 40s and 50s. As the date approaches, statements he has made seem to indicate that he may follow this prescription. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that it is one of my beliefs that we should do nothing to stop someone who wants to take their own life. It would be hypocritical for me to intervene and anyway there may be nothing I can do, especially if he is determined. What I did realise was that I had no emotional regrets about his imminent departure from the world. I have selfish regrets that a source of income and of woodworking and electrical skills will be cut off, but beyond that I simply feel numb about the occurrence.
Throughout my teenage years, probably in common with many people, between bursts of thinking about killing myself, I plotted how I would kill my father. Before I go any further I should emphasise that I was never sexually abused or physically abused. However, I do blame him very directly for screwing up a large chunk of my life. I am certainly not as forgiving as Larkin is. I believe part of his actions were getting back at his own father who always favoured his younger brother in terms of support financially and otherwise. My father was rarely violent towards me though he kicked me right across a room when I was about twelve and he threatened to cut off my ears off with a kitchen knife when I was sixteen and we were wrestling over it. (even now he is physically stronger than me), but I think that incident stemmed very much from his misreading the situation and thinking me threatening to take my own life was aimed at threatening to kill him to somehow win my mother from him. It was only later that my plans against him crystalised and they were only ever for my own sense of revenge and had nothing to do with my mother.
The ways in which my parents, especially my father, earned an undying hatred (and I call it so accurately because even 20 years on it is as strong as it was at the time and I envisage it never burning out) is because of how they undermined my life leaving it distorted probably for ever more. It was really not until I turned 34 and a woman proved willing to sacrifice her happiness on my behalf that I really came of age. I had been kept back from maturing properly into an adult by the psychological burdens my father put on me.
The first element is not going to seem shocking, but it was the way I was free labour for my father. He owned one third of an acre (about 0.13 ha) on which he grew vegetables and I cannot remember a weekend when I was not forced to weed or water 'the land' as he called it. There were bushes to clear and lawns to mow and fruit to clear up, jobs for every month of the year in the cold, the hot, the rain, whatever. He grew a vast range of vegetables and every kind of temperate climate fruit available at the time. Each Summer and Autumn there were things to be harvested. Once we had exhausted the crop from this source it was out into the woodlands to pick buckets of blackberries and rosehips. Then it was backbreaking work picking up innumerable sweet chestnuts from the floors of other woods. I know self-sufficiency was popular at the time, but I simply felt like a serf. I received my board and lodging and some pocket money, but was never paid for this incessant year round work. Refusing to work or treading in the wrong place on 'the land' or dropping or spilling something all resulted in bed without dinner or a smack (still legal in the 1970s). When friends were out on their bicycles or at the park or playing board games or listening to cassettes, I was out there serving one man's empire. I have an intense loathing of any gardening to this day and will go nowhere near it.
The second thing that I despise my father for distorting my life with was mock examinations. I lived in a county that had scrapped the so-called 11-plus examination (taken at 10, which chose which school children went to at the age of 11, it is still used in Kent and Buckinghamshire) even before I started school. However, this did not stop my parents sitting me down in examination room conditions to incessantly do mock 11-plus papers from at least the age of 9 onwards. I found them difficult (they had IQ test questions as well as the usual short essays and mathematics you expect on entrance papers), especially the logic problems and the mathematics, both skills I quite lack. However, the fact that I might find them impossible was never taken into consideration. In my parents' view I only did badly on them because I was lazy and did not apply myself. This treatment was worse than the gardening as the room I had to do the tests in looked out on the road and I could see my friends cycling by to the park while I was stuck indoors. There was absolutely no point doing these mock examinations. I went to the local state secondary school at 11 anyway and you had to do no examinations to get in there. I did reasonably well and see no benefit from doing hour-upon-hour of these tests. I blame it on some high expectations of my parents. I know I said disappointment is the highest form of flattery, but I wish they had simply taken a more realistic view of my abilities and not inflicted these useless tests on me, that gained nothing except making me loathe them even further.
You may note that I have shifted from 'him' to 'them'. My father was the clear instigator of all the activities I mention here, but my mother was a clear accomplice. It maybe she was frightened or she believed in what my father insisted upon. However, if he had adopted a more humane line towards me I am sure she would have gone along with that too.
The element of their behaviour which caused me greatest difficulty was the humiliation. Now, I know that all parents embarrass their children at some time or another, but it does not usually form the basis of sustained action. I had always felt to be an outsider in my school. Everyone in the area was well off, but we lived in the 'wrong part of town', we lacked the consumer items most people had, I had a strange name and had never been baptised. All of these things were aspects pupils ridiculed me on, but I could resist those jibes. What totally undermined me was the humiliation from home which began around the age of twelve and led to stress-related illnesses and made it almost impossible for me to operate in the adult world until many years later. For some reason my father decided that the way I spoke sounded like 'the hooting of an idiot child' and that the way I walked was like that of an 'imbecile' or someone who was mentally handicapped (as the term was in the 1970s). I was constantly reminded of these deficiencies in public as well as criticised incessantly about them at home as if they were something I could alter and was refusing to do so. Attempts to walk and stand differently to avoid such criticism simply led my mother demonstrating that I walked like a woman trying to defend herself from being raped! You can imagine what that felt like to a boy in his teenage years. Most people lack self-confidence as a teenager and are self-conscious of their appearance. I am not an attractive man and am clumsy, so to be constantly told by your parents that you look like someone who has such difficulties makes you feel there is no point. At school I would simply hide in the school library all the time so as to avoid going into the playground. Seeing a victim (and my parents blamed me for making myself that victim when I was beaten up in a public library) I became the butt of jokes and the 'Laurel and Hardy' theme would be whistled whenever I passed. Ironically, it was only my ability to overcome the stress-related illnesses that I began to suffer that won me any standing at school (though of course not at home where I was clearly blamed for these illnesses).
Once I left home, I had no confidence that anyone could find me anything more than a replica of the elephant man and I simply threw myself into work and hanging out in libraries until they closed, as a refuge. I tried to eat myself to death by bingeing on cakes and then I tried alcohol, drinking until I could stomach no more every night of the week. These things dulled the pain but did not kill me. To some degree it was planning my revenge on my father that carried me through and slowly I was able to develop my own identity as something worth people's time, but it took years. How I wish we had had blogging and chatrooms back then, it would have been less isolating. The only real escape was into cakes, beer and the fantasy fiction I wrote.
My life has been many times better than that of people who have suffered sexual and physical abuse and I believe they are the real courageous ones in our society. I have thought with time that I would find forgiveness of my father, but a quarter of a century has passed and I feel the anger no less strongly than when I left home. I do not think I have the capacity to forgive him for how difficult he made my life, especially personal relationships. If you entirely strip away every iota of someone's faith in themselves they have absolutely no basis that they can interact with other people on more than a superficial level. My memory is failing as I have commented before, and as I cannot offer my father forgiveness, he may get forgetting out of me, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the incidents are still very raw in my mind and whilst many other things have faded from it, these stay there very clearly. I have no idea what motivated him to behave the way he did, I never really cared. I would have preferred an absent or oblivious father to the one I got and I will not mourn his passing.
As for the rest of us, as usual, I return to the kind of sentiments Larkin outlined at the start and I am thinking of making my motto:
'Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.'
Wise words.
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
The reason why I thought of this poem was that my father turns 70 next month. In his middle-aged years he always said he wanted to take a pill on his 70th birthday and to simply fall asleep and die so that he was no longer a burden on society. I think this partly stems from the burdens elderly relatives in his and my mother's family inflicted on him in his 40s and 50s. As the date approaches, statements he has made seem to indicate that he may follow this prescription. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that it is one of my beliefs that we should do nothing to stop someone who wants to take their own life. It would be hypocritical for me to intervene and anyway there may be nothing I can do, especially if he is determined. What I did realise was that I had no emotional regrets about his imminent departure from the world. I have selfish regrets that a source of income and of woodworking and electrical skills will be cut off, but beyond that I simply feel numb about the occurrence.
Throughout my teenage years, probably in common with many people, between bursts of thinking about killing myself, I plotted how I would kill my father. Before I go any further I should emphasise that I was never sexually abused or physically abused. However, I do blame him very directly for screwing up a large chunk of my life. I am certainly not as forgiving as Larkin is. I believe part of his actions were getting back at his own father who always favoured his younger brother in terms of support financially and otherwise. My father was rarely violent towards me though he kicked me right across a room when I was about twelve and he threatened to cut off my ears off with a kitchen knife when I was sixteen and we were wrestling over it. (even now he is physically stronger than me), but I think that incident stemmed very much from his misreading the situation and thinking me threatening to take my own life was aimed at threatening to kill him to somehow win my mother from him. It was only later that my plans against him crystalised and they were only ever for my own sense of revenge and had nothing to do with my mother.
The ways in which my parents, especially my father, earned an undying hatred (and I call it so accurately because even 20 years on it is as strong as it was at the time and I envisage it never burning out) is because of how they undermined my life leaving it distorted probably for ever more. It was really not until I turned 34 and a woman proved willing to sacrifice her happiness on my behalf that I really came of age. I had been kept back from maturing properly into an adult by the psychological burdens my father put on me.
The first element is not going to seem shocking, but it was the way I was free labour for my father. He owned one third of an acre (about 0.13 ha) on which he grew vegetables and I cannot remember a weekend when I was not forced to weed or water 'the land' as he called it. There were bushes to clear and lawns to mow and fruit to clear up, jobs for every month of the year in the cold, the hot, the rain, whatever. He grew a vast range of vegetables and every kind of temperate climate fruit available at the time. Each Summer and Autumn there were things to be harvested. Once we had exhausted the crop from this source it was out into the woodlands to pick buckets of blackberries and rosehips. Then it was backbreaking work picking up innumerable sweet chestnuts from the floors of other woods. I know self-sufficiency was popular at the time, but I simply felt like a serf. I received my board and lodging and some pocket money, but was never paid for this incessant year round work. Refusing to work or treading in the wrong place on 'the land' or dropping or spilling something all resulted in bed without dinner or a smack (still legal in the 1970s). When friends were out on their bicycles or at the park or playing board games or listening to cassettes, I was out there serving one man's empire. I have an intense loathing of any gardening to this day and will go nowhere near it.
The second thing that I despise my father for distorting my life with was mock examinations. I lived in a county that had scrapped the so-called 11-plus examination (taken at 10, which chose which school children went to at the age of 11, it is still used in Kent and Buckinghamshire) even before I started school. However, this did not stop my parents sitting me down in examination room conditions to incessantly do mock 11-plus papers from at least the age of 9 onwards. I found them difficult (they had IQ test questions as well as the usual short essays and mathematics you expect on entrance papers), especially the logic problems and the mathematics, both skills I quite lack. However, the fact that I might find them impossible was never taken into consideration. In my parents' view I only did badly on them because I was lazy and did not apply myself. This treatment was worse than the gardening as the room I had to do the tests in looked out on the road and I could see my friends cycling by to the park while I was stuck indoors. There was absolutely no point doing these mock examinations. I went to the local state secondary school at 11 anyway and you had to do no examinations to get in there. I did reasonably well and see no benefit from doing hour-upon-hour of these tests. I blame it on some high expectations of my parents. I know I said disappointment is the highest form of flattery, but I wish they had simply taken a more realistic view of my abilities and not inflicted these useless tests on me, that gained nothing except making me loathe them even further.
You may note that I have shifted from 'him' to 'them'. My father was the clear instigator of all the activities I mention here, but my mother was a clear accomplice. It maybe she was frightened or she believed in what my father insisted upon. However, if he had adopted a more humane line towards me I am sure she would have gone along with that too.
The element of their behaviour which caused me greatest difficulty was the humiliation. Now, I know that all parents embarrass their children at some time or another, but it does not usually form the basis of sustained action. I had always felt to be an outsider in my school. Everyone in the area was well off, but we lived in the 'wrong part of town', we lacked the consumer items most people had, I had a strange name and had never been baptised. All of these things were aspects pupils ridiculed me on, but I could resist those jibes. What totally undermined me was the humiliation from home which began around the age of twelve and led to stress-related illnesses and made it almost impossible for me to operate in the adult world until many years later. For some reason my father decided that the way I spoke sounded like 'the hooting of an idiot child' and that the way I walked was like that of an 'imbecile' or someone who was mentally handicapped (as the term was in the 1970s). I was constantly reminded of these deficiencies in public as well as criticised incessantly about them at home as if they were something I could alter and was refusing to do so. Attempts to walk and stand differently to avoid such criticism simply led my mother demonstrating that I walked like a woman trying to defend herself from being raped! You can imagine what that felt like to a boy in his teenage years. Most people lack self-confidence as a teenager and are self-conscious of their appearance. I am not an attractive man and am clumsy, so to be constantly told by your parents that you look like someone who has such difficulties makes you feel there is no point. At school I would simply hide in the school library all the time so as to avoid going into the playground. Seeing a victim (and my parents blamed me for making myself that victim when I was beaten up in a public library) I became the butt of jokes and the 'Laurel and Hardy' theme would be whistled whenever I passed. Ironically, it was only my ability to overcome the stress-related illnesses that I began to suffer that won me any standing at school (though of course not at home where I was clearly blamed for these illnesses).
Once I left home, I had no confidence that anyone could find me anything more than a replica of the elephant man and I simply threw myself into work and hanging out in libraries until they closed, as a refuge. I tried to eat myself to death by bingeing on cakes and then I tried alcohol, drinking until I could stomach no more every night of the week. These things dulled the pain but did not kill me. To some degree it was planning my revenge on my father that carried me through and slowly I was able to develop my own identity as something worth people's time, but it took years. How I wish we had had blogging and chatrooms back then, it would have been less isolating. The only real escape was into cakes, beer and the fantasy fiction I wrote.
My life has been many times better than that of people who have suffered sexual and physical abuse and I believe they are the real courageous ones in our society. I have thought with time that I would find forgiveness of my father, but a quarter of a century has passed and I feel the anger no less strongly than when I left home. I do not think I have the capacity to forgive him for how difficult he made my life, especially personal relationships. If you entirely strip away every iota of someone's faith in themselves they have absolutely no basis that they can interact with other people on more than a superficial level. My memory is failing as I have commented before, and as I cannot offer my father forgiveness, he may get forgetting out of me, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the incidents are still very raw in my mind and whilst many other things have faded from it, these stay there very clearly. I have no idea what motivated him to behave the way he did, I never really cared. I would have preferred an absent or oblivious father to the one I got and I will not mourn his passing.
As for the rest of us, as usual, I return to the kind of sentiments Larkin outlined at the start and I am thinking of making my motto:
'Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.'
Wise words.
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