Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Thirty Three - Clearing The Decks

Part of the reasons for the nightly journaling was that communications with my family varied between silence and an opaque calm. I knew had to appear to take what they said at face value. It was best to say less when I had very little choice. To openly question them could easily have lead to defensive 'Don't you trust me?' type statements, in which when my family failed to get away with explaining less than was helpful, they played the victim. I say 'played the victim', I was well past, and appreciative of, the explanation for human behaviour expanded on in the paperback 'I'm Okay Your Okay' by Thomas A. Harris, which explained how the roles of victim, persecutor and rescuer were acted out, including how each flipped into the other, in ways that were coded, so as to appear to be 'normal behaviour' for the great mass of people. When well before the roles flipped, they were dysfunctional. 

But in mid January I got a more sobering message from my family that I was thankful I could do nothing about. My mother was the only person in the family to attempt to keep in touch with me. Sometimes she wrote because she did not have a landline at home. She rarely rang. I had a long memory of her ringing of a Friday afternoon in the boarding school she made me to attend, where she rang from the social services and made them pay the phone bills little realising that every time the public call box phone rang every Friday, post lunch when I was sent off to answer it, the rest of the boys marked me out as 'a mother's boy' with each time I took the call and chatted with her.

But one mid week evening I was at home and my landlady picked the phone up, but it was for me. It was mother, 'Hello love I have got to be brief I am using Ted's phone but I have something to tell you.'. Ted was her most relied on friend on the allotments. I used to walk with her to see Ted and Nora his wife for tea and chat of a midweek evening when I lived in Gainsborough. Ted would give us a lift back home in his car. He was reliable, though sometimes exasperated as to what his reliability was for. They were an intelligent and open couple compared with many I knew in Gainsborough. 'It is your grandad.' mother said 'He fell down the stairs from the landing of his first floor flat a couple of weeks ago. He has been in hospital since and they are keeping him in. We don't know what is going to happen. But I have seen him in hospital. I will be in touch when there is more to tell.'. The flat was the first floor room in a house the council had divided to make two households in. Both the landing and the stairs were very narrow. Mother's phone call told me everything and nothing.

Gran, his wife, had died four years earlier. They had both moved into the council flat in the village from the house they lived in for fifty years about eight years earlier. Her life was ebbing away when they were moved into the flat. To see her life shrink and ebb away further in the flat, as her will to live remained stronger than her weakening body. It was more numbing than alarming to witness. Part of me wanted a photo to remember her by. But my memories of here were so few so what would the photo be of? Or so ran the argument from mother's sister, Alice who jealously guarded the photos of Gran that she had.

Gran died the month that I left Gainsborough to start care work in Nottingham. Modest as the job was, it was the start of my life opening out in more ways than I thought possible. It did not matter that when I arrived I clearly lack a sense of direction. There was always enough change happening around me to absorb that I could absorb better without my mother on hand to set tight limits on me. I would visit my parents for the weekend but after just a few months the imprint that living in the town had put on me felt like it was part of my past, that my parents needed me to preserve more than I needed to preserve it. I adapted around mother's routines, and helped her stave off 'empty nest syndrome' when I there. But what routines she filled her time with when I was away were her own concern.  49

Now, grandad was in hospital and whatever happened he was unlikely to recover, or go far. But in Nottingham I felt ready for a big change. After just short of a year and a half of journaling I felt ready to 'come out', regardless of whether the church in Lady Bay, the people I knew most and who might claim to know me most, approved of me doing, or not. I thought I had written out all of the shame that I had absorbed whilst growing up, for now at least. I no longer saw the point in being ashamed of what I was.

A less blinkered/isolated person than me would at this point have made their acquaintance of Nottingham gay helpline as part of their 'coming out' and slowly transferred their reliance on journaling to conversations with live human beings, whilst keeping both in balance with each other. I had contacted them twice, both times in haste more than believing that I could say to them what I confined to the journal. But being challenged on how I had been taught 'do without', 'be self reliant' and 'make do and mend' was difficult with me not realising that they were part of how I had isolated myself, even as life in Nottingham carried me along. 63

A church that wanted me to stay quietly closeted, so they could help me ignore that I was gay, was another fraught area. Their warning that 'The gay life is a lonely life' made me look at them and think 'And you think that me being around you dose not leave me feeling isolated?'. All I can say now is that the paradoxes I was living with, and trying simplify through journaling whilst I was wary of being helped, were more complex than I could have foreseen them being.

Meanwhile Grandad was dying in hospital and I was being kept well away from knowing much about it. My family did a fine line in sarcasm as the humour of detachment, covertly denying how withering the sarcasm was. One such line of humour, used about life outside the family, was an alternate take on the optimism of opportunity, 'Where there is a will there is a way'. But in our family such optimism became 'Where there is a will there are relatives.'. There opportunity meant the opportunity for family arguments where we each shared a sense of fractious entitlement as old grievances were aired in defence of claiming new chances in life. If I had been kept informed about his decline, then my main thought would not have been spoken out, 'At least he is being decisive in stepping away from the all old arguments and well rehearsed sense of grievance'.