Categories: uncategorized
Date: 24 June 2010 15:21:17
I was locked out. For a long, long time, I've had a poor relationship with my parents. We haven't lived in the same town for well over twenty years now, and my friends would oscillate between despair and bafflement when they discovered how infrequently I speak to my parents. Gaps of months and months between phone calls were quite normal, and there were much longer gaps between visits. When I did talk to them, I'd never actually talk to them. Words would pass from my lips to their ears, but they were words carefully chosen to have as little content as possible. Most of my friends now know that this is the case and make no mention of it. But occasionally someone else will ask after my parents, or say something to draw my attention to the state of our relations, and cause me to ponder whether I can still justify it to myself. And finally, on one recent occasion, I saw a deeper reason for the way things are. It is simply that my parents never spoke to me. All sorts of things that would be important to me about them and, thus, about where I came from, have been deliberately withheld. There are silly trivial things, like their politics. My parents would both determinedly take the view that nobody must know how they voted, especially not their own kin. The fact that the only newspapers that entered their house were the mail and the telegraph, whose content they took at face value, and the fact that they would frequently lambast Attila the Hun's socialist tendencies, didn't leave a lot of room for doubt about their views, but despite how obvious it was, they made a point of not telling me. More importantly, I would have liked to know how they met. They came from different towns, different backgrounds, and quite different social outlooks. In retrospect it looks like the strangest man in the country managed to hook up with the loopiest woman, and become my parents. Some concrete information might have helped me understand better, and perhaps appreciate them better. But they made a point of not telling me. Evading questions (a familiar trait to anybody who knows me) and teasingly refusing to answer direct enquiries were their standard responses. And there are so many things along those lines that they simply wouldn't tell me. Now, they are both unable to tell me, and all of their friends are either dead, or don't know, or also aren't able to tell me. They locked me out of so much of their lives that it really is a wonder to me that I have any relation with them at all.