The Politics of Being a Kid

When I was a kid I had the sort of set up where my dad lived in one house and I lived in another one with my mum. It was a flat, actually, with my mum . . . we didn’t have a house until much later and that was only when we had to care for my Granny. At one time, these two “homes” were presented to me as places where I would always be welcome and without me having to do anything to earn admittance. But, as I grew up, I realized that this was only an illusion.

If you live, or have lived as part of this type of family, you will know what I mean. It is not something idyllic and amicable, usually, and the feelings of the parents will often get in the way and ruin the child’s illusions completely. This is what happened with me.

My mum was always the one who took care of me, managed all the practical stuff, etc. whereas my dad did none of this. My mum was the one responsible for taking care of me when I was ill, making sure I went to school, making sure I ate properly . . . She wasn’t much good at any of these things, but she did the best she could.

But she was also the one who put on airs and told me to behave like a nice, well brought up young lady. She told me to speak properly and not to associate with what she called “riff-raff”. My mum has a lot of prejudices, whereas my dad has none. My mum hates my dad, I think, for this and many other reasons – she considers him to be part of the riff-raff, and nothing he ever did could change her opinion. He just wasn’t good enough for her, basically.

If you’re reading this, you might already have got the impression that my mother is some kind of high-class snob. But I should set you right on this. She is a snob, but she is not high-class and is actually just as common as my dad. Like I said, she puts on airs.

So, with my mum, I had very little fun and, suffice it to say, really didn’t like her very much. At my dad’s house I was allowed to be a kid. He was a funny man who liked kids and who, by rights, should have been father to a small army of them. He didn’t get the chance though, because he met my mother, who didn’t want children at all and who had me, grudgingly, because people told her that giving away her child would be something she would regret in later life. She didn’t marry my dad and he wouldn’t have wanted to be married to her, especially since, not long after I was born, she went completely mad and was eventually awarded the title of paranoid schizophrenic. She resented me, she said I’d made her ill, and she made me feel guilty because of all that. Neither my dad, nor my mum, had any more children and I suppose this might be evidence of how badly burned they felt by the experience of having me.

It was a difficult situation.

I was brought up by my mother, and I was always told to be loyal to her. She’s the sort of woman who hangs on to her petty, childish jealousies and rivalries, and she expects complete loyalty from other people. She’s a vicious person really, when she wants to be. She wouldn’t countenance me siding with my father in any way and I spent most of my childhood either trying not to say anything good about him at all, or, worse, trying to please my mother by saying something evil about him that I’d heard her say previously.

I wanted to be with my dad though; laughable and worthy of derision as my mother found it, I loved him.
So, this is the thing about being the only child of separated parents, your whole life becomes a political balancing act. Your mother is usually the one you end up being loyal to because it’s usually her who does the looking after. And, in cases like that – certainly in mine – you always have to maintain an image and have a strong policy on the level of preferment you give to each parent. It’s the reverse of parents having more than one child and then having to be even-handed with all of them – you can’t play favourites, someone will complain, and, most likely, it would be my mother doing the lion’s share of the whining.

In dealing with this, you might end up choosing one parent over the other, and then spend the rest of your life regretting it, or, failing that, you have to work a complicated coalition in which you are the lynch-pin and overall peacemaker. There are many types of family and many ways of working this out; maybe some people’s parents are easy going, I don’t know. Mine weren’t. As I said though, you have to decide on a policy early and, whatever you do, you always have to stick to it so that one or other of said parents won’t turn around and complain about your inconsistency. Otherwise it’s a bit like politicians who get into power and then revoke all their political promises. It doesn’t go down well.

I won’t lie, it’s a delicate situation that I never quite learned how to handle. And I love my dad dearly, but I no longer have a relationship with him. My particular situation became precarious some time ago and I had to pledge my loyalty solely to one parent: my increasingly hysterical and semi-senile mother.

True to say, I feel a lot of anger towards my dad, for various reasons, but deep down I can’t forget how much I loved him. He was my whole heart when I was a kid. My mother is now, was then, and probably always will be a selfish, manipulative, nerve-ridden woman with about as much sense of other people’s feelings as a lump of stone. She is only ever concerned with her own interests and cannot comprehend when someone says that they don’t care about her problems. It just never occurs to her that she isn’t the centre of the universe.

I have always put this down to the schizophrenia. Schizophrenic people believe that the world – meaning the people around them – is conspiring to hurt, kill, or otherwise damage them. They often have raging paranoia and a continual distrust of other people, and so, by believing that everyone in the world wants to hurt them, they must also believe that they are the whole focus of attention for other people. If you try to explain that other people do not notice them, or are not remotely interested in their lives, they will not believe you. When my I was a child, and a teenager, my mum constantly used to ask me what my father said about her behind her back and would fail to believe me when I told her that he had, in fact, said nothing. While I accept that many people might recognize this behaviour from their own parents, my mother took it further by believing that my father would actually spy on us, or hire other people to spy on us; she believed that he would do things to ruin her life, or maybe even that he would hurt her if she did not give him access to me. All of which, I can assure you, was based on nothing because my dad doesn’t have money, or power, and he is not a vindictive or cruel man in any way. (I should say that she also developed an extended paranoid delusion that the neighbours were plotting to steel her lawnmower and that the perfectly harmless neighbourhood kids kept looking through her windows during the day as a prelude to a break-in.)

It was difficult with my mother – it’s STILL difficult – and it requires a lot of patience and dutiful-daughter behaviour from me. As a kid, of course, I was entirely dependent on her and I was afraid that she wouldn’t take care of me if I didn’t agree with everything she said. Other people might not have chosen this tactic, and most of you probably don’t have the burden of a mentally ill parent. But that’s not why I’m writing this.

I wanted to write this blog post because it occurs to me that other people, whose parents might have separated at some point, might recognize some of the political shifts and loyalties that I’m describing. I am the only child of two people who met, had a very brief relationship resulting in my mother getting pregnant with a child she did not want, and then decided to split up. Needless to say, I have never lived in a house with both my parents and I have never had a bread-winning, authoritarian father whose job it was to fight my corner when my harridan of a mother started breathing down my neck. My mother was my provider, my father was the shiftless, selfish, self-sufficient man who took me to the beach in the summer holidays and fed me too many sweets when I stayed at his house. He wasn’t interested in my personal problems, or in taking responsibility for me. He only remembered me when he had free time, and he took my clinging adoration of him as some kind of ego-boost – he didn’t realize how much and how badly I needed him. For the most part, he left me with her and she turned me against him.

It’s sad. It makes me sad.

I don’t know what people with proper fathers, and “normal” or stereotypical families, think about their parents, or what kind of ties they have to each of them. I have always assumed that people who have always lived with both their parents under one roof and never known anything except that sort of family life take it for granted that their parents are one unit, “mumndad”, not separate people, Mum . . . and Dad.

The only picture I have of my parents together was taken when I was a baby, probably not long born, and they are sitting so far apart that you could fit two other people in between them. Body language is very telling, I think; so, that’s how I’ve always thought of them – separate, distant, and, if they could possibly avoid it, not even linked by me. There is mum and me, and then there is dad somewhere else, and, much as I love him, I can never have a very close relationship with him because my mother, I have been taught to believe, is the one I need.

Who else feels like this about their parents? I think it must be fairly common for people whose parents are either divorced or separated, whether it happens in early childhood or later life, whether they are only children or not, whether the parents themselves are mentally healthy or not? That situation always requires the kids to pull in one direction or another; it always requires them to have a policy and pick a side.

This is something I wanted to write for all the kids out there who have felt that they are walking a tightrope and living only to please other people. This is for the kids who have grown up having to toe a line for one parent, while, simultaneously, cutting the other one out of their lives.

I was an angry kid and I am an even angrier adult. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage . . . Ok, I know, this is no time to steal song lyrics, but, what the hell, it fits! Living with that situation for so many years makes you angry. It twists you up. And it never leaves you.

I’ve lost my dad because of my mum. I can’t ever get him back, and she’s so far gone into schizophrenic La La Land that she doesn’t even see that that’s happened, or that it’s got anything to do with her. She still asks me if I’ve seen him, as if we’re back in the old days and she thinks I see him all the time. Like I said, she’s self-absorbed and semi-senile and she doesn’t see that other people have feelings or that she might affect those feelings in any way just by being herself. She doesn’t think she’s ruined anything.

Other people might be luckier than me, because maybe their parents get to see, eventually, that they have torn their children in two, and maybe they apologize for it. But so many people don’t ever see. I’ll never be able to make my mother see. And that’s why I think it’s so hard to be a kid. You have to be tough to survive something like this, you have to grow up quick and grow up clever. Most people just want their parents to grow up as well. That’s all I ever wanted for mine.