THE MOTHER OF ALL SONS

Some days recently it’s started to feel as if my life is transforming into some dark and unfunny adaptation of “Steptoe and Son” (if “Steptoe” had been written by Strindberg and directed by Bergman, that is). The less than merry dance (that in Galton and Simpson’s sure hands was comedy gold) that Albert and Harold performed as they remained trapped forever in each other’s orbits is starting to have a certain bitter resonance with me, but I don’t think I’ve got the strength of character or the sheer brutality of personality needed to handle it.

It’s hard for me to talk about this stuff to those of you out there playing “happy families” or who can spend time in the same room as your nearest and dearest without world war three breaking out and everyone coming to the brink of nervous collapse. Really, if you enjoy each other’s company or feel any sense of being valued or supported by your parents, then I truly envy you, I honestly do, but I ask you to try and understand me when I say that I have no comprehension of what that might be like to experience. It probably used to happen. I’m sure it once did… but I have no real memories of it any more.

It’s marvellous, isn’t it? I have a mind that’s constantly finding the time to dream up new and totally made-up awful memories, whilst at the same time it buries any pleasant ones that might be of some use to me.

I was awake for one long, dark night of the soul recently reflecting on my situation, with the words spinning around in my head. At one point, I figured, if I was to stand any chance of getting any sleep that night, I should write the thoughts down on paper and get them out of my head. I think, in my half-awake fatigue, I genuinely thought I might have been able to compose something poetic out of them (and to prove that there can be moments of lightness in the dark, it would have been called ‘fecal position’ after a typo t’beloved spotted at work recently), but reading those scribbles back now, I suspect they would have made quite possibly the most disturbing poem in the history of mankind.

Be warned, this is fairly frank stuff and makes for rather a bleak read. In the interests of honesty, punches are not being pulled here. I may well have woken up the next morning feeling less than proud of being even capable of such thoughts, but I still thought them:-

“I’ve spent my life avoiding responsibility & I cannot, shall not and will not take it now. It’s not fair, it’s not right & it’s too much to ask of me, nor should she want me to. I don’t want it, I don’t need it and I won’t do it. It’s depressing everything… affecting everything… ruining everything. It’s just too much. She’s all messed up, you’re all messed up & I’m all messed up. Everything seems to smell of sh-- now and it gets everywhere… I can smell it, taste it in the air all the time… I just want to sleep and all I can think about is her and her sh--ty ar--… I walk through that door and I just want to retch from the stench and the horror of the place and sometimes I can’t bring myself to even look at her any more… She talks to me in a way that you wouldn’t talk to a dog and this makes me snap back at her in reply… Sometimes I do feel like I just want to walk away, close the door behind me and never return…”

Does this all make me a bad person? Deep down (not all that deeply, actually, I suspect) I believe that it very probably does…

But then things are not always that bad. Sometimes, on some rare occasion, she’ll say or do something so thoughtful and so pathetically sweet that I will realise that most of what has happened to her and is still happening is not her fault… and so we’ll dance our merry dance again, spiralling down together into our own circles of hell to face our inevitable ultimate total madness together, and so it goes and so it goes…

I’ve been told that if you think you’re having a nervous breakdown that’s one of the surest signs that you’re probably not about to have one, as you’ve got enough control to see it happening and understand the dangers, so you’re probably fine. I maintain, however, that you can be totally aware that you’re about to have a car crash and not be in any position to change the inevitable collision.

I also read recently that “depression is not a sign of weakness, but rather it’s a sign that you’ve been trying to be strong for too long” (I got that off the internet. It’s rather neat, don’t you think? I would fully accredit the author, but I can’t find it again. Maybe I dreamt that up too…) so maybe that’s why things seem so bleak so often nowadays.

Our normal life does now seem to be an impossible dream that probably actually happened to someone else. I find myself growing more angry and resentful and bitter as the days pass along and it’s not the nicest facet of yourself to discover you have. Some people have a brilliant relationship with their parents, and, if you are lucky enough to be one of those people, then, like I said, I envy you, truly I do. Some people become parents because they have a need for that sense of ‘unconditional love’ but my relationship with my mother is more… ‘complicated’ than that, for despite the things that she sometimes might say, I can’t help but think that I’ve always felt like I am always something of a disappointment to her. But then my mother doesn’t see the world in quite the same way other people seem to. I don’t know. Maybe nobody else’s does either…

Are we all destined to feel as if we are a huge disappointment to our parents? Maybe it is just me then. Maybe I just am disappointing. Maybe I always was. Well, I suppose that it’s good to know that, when it comes to it, I’m always able to live down to expectations.