Generally I am a pretty sorted out guy. I work for a living, pay my taxes, have a loving and wonderful wife, a great bunch of friends and generally feel that my life is pretty sweet. Occasionally though, very very rarely when I am least expecting it, I will have a slight moment of...I'm trying to find an appropriate word and regret isn't quite it, nor is remorse. I may be getting ahead of myself here, but that is mostly because the actual nub of what I wish to say - the very thing that I wish to let spill from my mind to the keyboard and push off into the ether like a message in a bottle, feels so terrifically pathetic and weak to me, that I struggle to even type it. Let's begin at the beginning (at least the quick version).
I have never had any kind of relationship with my mother. I don't mean that usual kind of push me-pull you affair that most people have with their parent, where they love them but feel simultaneously infuriated by their little foibles. I don't speak of that affectionate exasperation that so often colours the relationship of one generation with the next. My mother was damaged long before I arrived on the scene, and likely remains so to this very day. Something fundamental broke within her at a very early age, and I don't think that anything that anybody - myself included - ever did was going to repair it.
For a start, my mother is a Misandrist, in the very truest sense of that word. I grew up being told tales of every man in her life - from her Father to her first husband to my own father - generally doing awful things and living up to her extremely low expectation of the gender as a whiole. I myself was lumped into that category. I recall vividly going away for a few days aged 17 with a friend, having only recently started going out with a girl in my year at college. Flush with the first bloom of this new infatuation, I was told by my mother "If you meet any nice girl who fancies a bit, don't be silly, you crack on with it." "But Mum", I replied, "What about Lorna?". "Don't be daft," came the instant reply, "all men are bastards Gregory, don't break the mould."
Gregory. My given birth name, sure. But used now only by her and my beloved Grandmother, who can frankly call me whatever she likes because she is so magnificent. Nobody else calls me it or ever has. I don't really know why - I always suspected that people are just inherently vocally lazy and prefer shortened versions of names, but I have been told by several people (my wife foremost amongst them) that I just don't seem like a Gregory. Whatever the truth, if anyone does ever call me by the name (my grandmother excepted of course) I bridle at it to this day. It's not just the association with an unhappier time, it really doesn't feel like my name. I am Greg, and that is the end of it.
And make no mistake, it was an unhappier time. It is difficult to describe my childhood without sounding as if I exaggerate. It is also inherently difficult for me to not feel as if I am somehow exaggerating my own issues, that I am complaining when I have little to complain about. I was always fed and clothed. I always had a roof over my head. I grew up around animals and the great outdoors. I never wanted for toys and books. But I also recall one occasion in 19 years of living at home when I got a hug from my own mother. It was the day that I saw my cat accidentally trodden to death by a horse (which wasn't anywhere near as comical as it might now read) I was 15, and inconsolable. And for a full five minutes, my mother turned into a human being and actually held me in her arms as I wailed. Other memories, worse memories, are far more prevalent and ingrained. Being told that my parents could have had a much better life had I never been born. Being made the butt of innumerable arguments between my parents. Being shouted at, belittled and punished if I so much as looked in the wrong way at her (or was perceived to have done so). Her little dog which was trained by her to attack myself and my father whenever we were near my mother - to her own great amusement. Even the particular night when she went to poke me as I walked past her, to encourage said dog to bite me, and I knocked her hand away, causing the dog to miss and bite her. As much trouble as that dog caused me, I felt sorry for it that evening as it was ignored, sitting there wondering what it had done wrong. Of course, by the time my father came home, I had 'held her down while the dog savaged her' and I ended up punished as usual.
Mostly I don't think on these things, nor any of the other stuff that occurred to me in those years at home. I mean, it's always there and I certainly live with the influences, but I don't consciously brood on it. It is a thing, it happened and now it doesn't. I haven't spoken to mother in years, haven't seen her since early January 2000. But very occasionally, an image or a song or a smell will take me back to a memory - good or bad - that will make me think of her, and of the relationship that we never had. It isn't regret, as I said at the beginning, because you can't regret something that never happened, nor can you miss it. My mother was never maternal with me - it just wasn't in her. She fed and clothed me, and made sure I was generally ok, but there was never any warmth or anything I would describe as love between us. The day I left home - a day that I had been counting down to for years - she cried, though I suspect as much because she knew that her life would soon change for the worse as any other reason. Sure enough, my father left shortly after I did, and she became that bitter, lonely old woman that she'd been practising to be for most of her life.
I don't even know if most of the things that she told me about her past which might explain her being the way she is were true - my mother has a very fractious relationship with the truth. Whether it is true that her first husband beat her I will never know. Whether the things that she claimed happened to her as a young girl at the hands of various men I will also never know. There are so many blanks and so many question marks that I essentially gave up trying many years ago to discover anything about her. She lives in a fantasy world, seemingly more with each passing year, and the vague impressions I am able to garner at distance from her occasional internet ravings and other sources all indicate the problem getting worse year on year. One day, I suspect I will simply receive a call telling me she has passed, and I honestly don't see what reaction I will have beyond a shrug.
But why a moment of weakness? Because I am a sentimental soul, and very occasionally I sit and think about the relationship that people are supposed to have with their parents and more specifically about the relationship that boys are supposed to have with their mothers. I am very lucky in that I have a whole legion of women I have now throughout my life who are happy to 'adopt' me - perhaps seeing in me some need for 'mothering' that even I myself remain unaware of in any conscious sense. But I can't help but think sometimes that I am a compassionate person too, and that I would have had a great deal of love to give to my mother had she only been able to receive it. I think that terribly melodramatic and melancholic thought from time to time and it makes me sad. It cuts at something very deep within me, and I am not sure that it is something that all the surrogate mothers in the world will ever truly solve.
It also makes me sad that I never got to know huge swathes of my family (on my father's side) until I was 19 because my mother did not like them. I had met them of course, and was vaguely aware of them in some ill-defined distance, but I never really had the opportunity to really know them until much later. I wonder now if I had had that opportunity whether I would have seen a lot more of Terry, and whether that might have eased some of the burden of guilt at his passing, with all the things left unsaid and undone that shouldn't have been. I feel that perhaps I should be angry at my mother for this, but in all honesty the main emotion that I feel when thinking of her is pity. She was bright enough, and perhaps had she trodden a different path in life she might have been happier and better. Maybe me and that other her would have been close - maybe we would have shared ideas and thoughts and feelings.
I am more than happy with the man that I grew to be. I am pretty sure that she is not. Then again, having not seen me since I was 19 years old, perhaps I presume too much on her part there. The last time we spoke, roughly 8 years ago, the conversation ended much as it had begun - with her telling me that I was an awful person, and that she would simply hang up and never speak to me again. I changed my number to help her keep that promise, and though I get the occasional email from her every few years with some cryptic nonsense attached, mostly we simply exist quite separately from each other.
Had she been a touchy-feely mother and I a happy, carefree child, then I think I would have been much different. I wouldn't have appreciated the plight of the lonely and the awkward as much. i would not have felt such easy sympathy with the displaced and the unhappy. I would not have felt so driven to help those who are distressed. I would have been less self-sufficient. In my weaker moments like this though, I reflect that perhaps I might also have been more relaxed and confident. maybe I might have been more at ease with compliments, more free to feel my feelings without the mountain of critical self analysis that instantly follows my every emotive response (and in many cases precedes them). The truth is that I will never know. It isn't regret. It isn't even sorrow. It's just a moment when I wonder what might have been if things had been different. It's a moment that will sucker punch me emotionally, and leave me temporarily questioning myself before normality asserts itself.
I don't know how many people read this blog, nor even if anyone will read this entry, but these are the things that I had to say today, and I feel - if not better - at least a little released for having said them. But for those who do stop by - please understand that this is not a cry for help. Please don't assume that I am in trouble or in need of help. I am aware even as I write all of this just how melodramatic and awful it may sound, but this is simply me talking to myself in textual form. It's almost a kind of therapy, helping me through my moment of weakness. It's ok. I am here, I am happy and I am alive. And everyone needs to be a little maudlin from time to time.
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