People who watch or listen to Disaffected often comment that it must be difficult to tell the stories of abuse from my childhood and youth.
It isn’t. Telling the world about the lies, the psychological manipulation, the night raids and beatings, doesn’t faze me. It never has, telling stories about the alarming or the extremes I’ve encountered. Perhaps it’s connected to my ability to be competent in (other people’s ) emergencies. For all my neuroticism, especially about my internal anxieties, I’m a good friend in a disaster. I don’t fall apart or cry until I’ve taken care of the immediate danger.
It is also easy for me to tell these stories because they have a pedagogical purpose; I am not narrating my past to get sympathy. I do not want it or need it. I take this approach because it is effective at helping other people see their own lives and pasts, and their potential futures, more clearly.
What is difficult to talk about are the good times, the happy memories. They are fewer, of course, but they exist. It is hard for a person to know how to understand a mother who “loves” you one day and hates you the next (and for most of the next days). I find it hard to express it.
There is an even deeper loss that I am coming to understand only recently. As I approach 50, I know that my life is more than half gone. Though I wouldn’t have predicted this feeling even a few years ago, knowing that I will never have my own family is heavy on my mind.
What could have been, but was not, is a mournful part of middle age.
The full knowledge of it is coming home to me now. What my family could have had, what I tried to magic into the world long past the time that ship had sailed.
That’s why I went into debt to buy my mother a house. If I could solve her lifelong money problems, we could be a real family. We could make supper together with good humor. There wouldn’t be any more need for screaming, or raging, or crying, or talking about suicide.
‘Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for these things will have passed away.’
That was never possible.
There was a time before I became hard, and mean. As a boy and a youth, I was not this way. I wanted my family to be happy. I loved caring for my baby brother and sister. I adored the cats and enjoyed caring for them, until they were inevitably given away. I loved my mother and I wanted to make her stop crying and to make her happy.
There was no place for that love to go. I wasn’t allowed to give my mother the love I wanted to give. Whatever I gave her was never enough. Often, what I did in love was thrown back at me as evidence of my selfish depravity.
There is still no place for that love to go, and there may never be.
Telling the truth about an ugly past is not difficult. Being unable to give love is.
I am 47 this year and have similar feelings about not having a family. When I was younger I was terrified of having children and thought it was best to end the 'generational trauma'. I was was afraid of being a terrible parent and behaving like my mother. Now there's no going back and I wonder if I made a big mistake. I don't want to blame everything on my family and I need to take responsibility for my own decisions, but there's no doubt that my childhood made me believe that I would fuck it up. I didn't expect to feel so sad about it later on.
You’re writing is always so true and beautiful. Your words have inspired me and taught me so much about myself and the world. Thank you. You inspire a great deal of admiration, gratitude, and affection in my heart. Wishing you every blessing.