The last three posts have been something of a respite for me even though events didn’t turn out quite the way I’d hoped at the time. The stark truth that hit me just over a week ago has made me question everything and has left me with some utterly baffling mysteries. Why did my Dad dislike me so much? When did this start? Why and how did dislike become violence? As a youngster I simply accepted that I was a bad child and deserved every painful and humiliating punishment. Recently while I was chatting with Biki she asked me the perfectly reasonable question, was he violent in any other way in particular towards my Mum? The answer to that was definitely no, I’ll say without any hesitation that he worshipped her and would not have harmed her in any way. Biki’s next point was this…
ahhh so he was jealous of the boy he didn’t have. he wanted his own, and instead of a nice big strapping lad, he got a smart, small sensitive boy he didn’t know how to communicate with. and felt inferior to.
And there, I’m very much afraid we may have the beginnings of an answer. The principal reason for his first marriage failing was that his wife didn’t merely not want children, she detested them and he desperately wanted a family of his own. The divorce was quick and I believe painless, she’d got a job at Buckingham Palace which meant she could get out of what she saw as a rural backwater and he was free to court my divorced Mum. Mum’s divorce had been messy and drawn out as my father contested it and then tried to sue for custody of me but eventually he was persuaded to give it up and she was free. So they got married, he got an instant family including a ready made son and I was deliriously happy at first because I was no longer the only 12 year old boy I knew who didn’t have a Daddy. The cracks started to appear pretty soon though when it became clear that I was never going to be strong, never going to excel at any sports but preferred my music, literature and poetry. The dream was more or less shattered and he had a sham of a son who was also way beyond him intellectually.
This may cause some of you to ask was I wrong about my Mum, did I “invent” her love for me? The answer there is an emphatic no, she loved me every bit as much as I believed and needed but Dad was a very controlling man and wouldn’t allow what he saw as softness towards me. Mum and I danced around the issue of my sexuality from the time I was 14 but she didn’t dare ask the question because knowing the answer she’d have felt compelled to tell Dad and believe me when I say ECT and aversion therapy would have followed within days.
Love
It is indeed tough issues, and when it comes to relations and love, normal reasoning doesn’t seem to apply. Maybe your dads ex-wife didn’t want kids, seeing herself having them with him knowing what he was really like towards kids? Maybe she saw that equation as impossible, that’s why she “hated” kids. Just a thought.
Sometimes we’re not given the whole truth, maybe the answer isn’t there for us to see, at all.
Love
Daniel
So true, I’m beginning to think that all I ever had was partial truths, never the whole story. The worst thing is knowing that I can never hope to learn the full truth about any of this now that my Mother is dead and my Step-Father won’t talk to me. All I can ever do is make what amount to educated guesses.
Love
Mac
I feel sorry also for your mother. She must have been really torn. She loved her husband, she married him and wanted to make him happy. She loved you so much, she couldn’t even tell you, she was restrained by him from expressing to you what she wanted to. Really no way for her to win without losing one of you or part of one of you. Truly between two competing forces and she must have hoped it would somehow work out. I wounder if ever in private she blamed herself?
Warmest wishes and have a great weekend.
Scottie
The worst part is that I suspect she did blame herself, maybe even felt that she’d betrayed me because, as you so rightly point out, the situation had come to the stage where keeping us both was no longer an option. In the end I decided that I should be the “sacrifice” and at least knew that he’d continue to love and care for her. That wasn’t an easy choice to make.
Love
Mac