However, it is in relations with my mother, especially my post-hospitalisation mother, that things have started becoming the most miserable, although there’s an awful lot of evidence to support the theory that things were never that peachy before that happened. Still, recently it’s been getting worse and the problem is that it’s sucking any of the miniscule amounts of joy out of my own life as I become more and more obsessed with her decay and the unpleasant side-effects of bodily breakdown, and I start to see that decay and transfer her dissolution onto the faces and the bodies of everyone else I look at. I no longer see people as they are, but as the collapsed ruins that they will become and it’s mind-crushingly depressing. I’m sure that there is beauty in your world, but mine has currently very little in it, just more potential decay and corruption, filth and desolation.
Those crumbling humiliations are everywhere I look, not least when I look inwardly. I see parallels everywhere. She has a missing tooth, and the tooth in the same part of my mouth starts to ache. Her bowels collapse and mine come out in sympathy. Her spine is crooked and I see my own stoop and round-shouldered defeated figure in the mirror. I start to parallel her small hand gestures and nervous ticks myself and I am horrified when I catch myself doing it. I find that some of her more unpalatable thought processes then start to be mimicked by my own and I find myself saying just the kind of dreadful thing she might say or doing something she might do. Some days I think that I’m slowly being transformed into a hideous parody of her.
Are we all destined to become that which we most despise in others?
Is that ultimately the curse of having to live and endure family life?
Some days I even start to believe that she might very possibly be indulging in some kind of witchcraft. I’m no longer a real person at all, but some kind of golem-like clay entity that she’s breathed life into so that she can transfer her ailments into me. I’m turning into the painting in the attic. I am becoming Pandora’s box. Not only that, but I’m starting to hate myself for what I am becoming.
It’s one of the reasons I don’t buy into this sentimental beeswax about motherhood and family. Oh I can read pages and pages of hideous ballcocks of how wonderful people’s family are and how we should thank them and be grateful for them and, do you know what? I read that kind of stuff and it just makes me want to throw up sometimes. The sheer, unadulterated smugness of it all, the mindless presumptiveness that lies behind the thinking, the general cloying sentimentality that assumes that all our lives are the same, and that we should all react in the same way to situations when really, for a lot of people, their family experiences were truly unpleasant. Trust, decency and respect are things that should be worked at and earned. You don’t and shouldn’t get a free pass just because you share a certain amount of genetic material.
After all, when I look back there are so many reasons that I could blame my current all-pervading air of misery upon. For example, my relationships, such as they are, have always been complicated. There was the inevitable disappointment following the protracted pointless crush I had on the woman for whom, it turned out, I could never be her type (no radar for that kind of thing, me…). Still further back there was the day my long-term partner of the time finally left me after I caught her in bed with the bloke who, happily for them, eventually managed to persuade her not to go and sleep with a large percentage of his male friends like she had with mine. Then there was the person whom I considered at one time to be my very best friend in the whole wide world, the only one who truly understood me, despite her sometimes being terribly mean to me, who eventually took her own life. All these things are symptoms, though, and I think that the truth may be that I was deeply miserable many, many years before any of these events and some of these at least were perhaps just the inevitable outcomes of the circumstances of being in the vicinity of my own toxic personality.
So where did it all begin? Were there any early expectations of greatness that might have led to my adult disappointments? Not really. I don’t think that I was ever that bright. When I was fairly young, my father had some pretty unusual theories about growing up that I still would rather not think about and still make me squirm, and my mother seemed to put a weight of expectation and public performance upon me for which I was not really suited. I do, for example, recall being singled out for a particular demonstration of public humiliation in front of the whole school during the headmaster’s retirement event thanks to my mother singling me out to make a special presentation, a key moment in my life that sent me crawling into an internal shell that I made for myself.
How does that Philip Larkin poem start again…?
Despite all this, I am one of those people who believes that you can’t blame any of the mistakes you make over the age of twenty-five on anyone else but yourself, but some of those tiny moments from those formative years can stick to you like glue and come back to haunt your dreams and nightmares and even some of your waking thoughts decades later. Perhaps people should try to remember this when they commit their ‘harmless’ pranks or say some heartless thing. These moments, they don’t just go away, but they are always there, and can sometimes bury themselves deep in the soul of your victim or even yourself. Prior to all those tiny horrors, there were also those committed by my maternal grandparents and I had their overwhelming weight of expectation and conformity to contend with, and, despite my grandmother especially claiming to ‘not really like boys’, and me no doubt providing her with good reason for her opinion, she would still try and make me do things like display my scrawny body to the world no matter how much I might insist that I didn’t want to. That’s another of those tiny little moments that has stuck with me through the years and has had less than fortunate outcomes, not least in my crippling self-consciousness. I have a lot to hold them responsible for anyway. Wasn’t it they who made my mother what she is?
So when I am accused by her of being “stand-offish” or “not normal” in my relationship with my mother, in some ways I can only say that I am the person she made me into. My visit on Easter Sunday, much like the Mother’s Day that preceded it a few weeks ago, was not a success. I am now rapidly coming to the conclusion that it would be a better thing all round if I didn’t go there at all any more, certainly not on any of those occasions that bear a weight of expectation upon them. It was all my fault, of course. It always is. And even if it isn’t, by the time I’ve got home and processed it, it will be. The problem is, I fear, that despite all the years, we hardly know each other at all, and so our reactions can be unpredictable or, in my case, disappointing. I let her down simply because I am not the person that she wants me to be. I let myself down because I can’t be the person she wants me to be. She lets me down by wanting me to be something I cannot be. And so it goes, and so it goes…
I can watch other people doing “happy”. I can even see people who, by all measurable criteria should be unhappy, smiling and laughing away with such abandon, but such things remain an unfathomable mystery to me and I can sit there watching and wondering just what their secret is. How do they do that? How do they manage it? How can they achieve so easily and in such difficult circumstances that which is so far beyond me who, on paper at least, has so many more reasons to be happy?
So for these reasons, I sometimes wake up and feel like I am the unhappiest person in the world, and I know (honestly, I do) that it’s an extreme point of view and I know that it’s probably utter ballcocks, but the constant sense of joylessness and melancholia is there pretty much every single moment of every single day, and it is so very, very hard some days to extract any happiness out of anything I do, which makes it very, very hard to find much happiness in anything anyone else does, either, which, I suppose, probably explains a lot.
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