Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter One - A Serendipitous Escape (Part 1)

My 1987 escape plan went that smoothly that what I planned did not feel like the intent to escape that it actually was. For twenty six years I had lived on unreliable footings, always waiting for some firmer path but always unable to catch sight of where the sure footed path started. I wanted reliability without knowing how to recognise it if I saw it. From the different addresses I lived at in Lincolnshire, from my education and jobs I had done, and the serial failed attempts at making personal commitments, my 1980s had been a long series of false starts, each of which prepared me for, and led to, the next. The later attempts at starting again were improvements in the earlier attempts at work and friendships. But I needed something with clarity and energy behind it, to give me the same.

To wind back to what I was plotting my escape from, in the autumn of 1985 I was living in Gainsborough in North Lincolnshire and I was helped to move to a new modern flat by my new best friend, Sue Hethershaw. She did this after I had endured some seriously traumatic arguments within my family which required a change of address to put me in a more distant orbit around them. Sue had been looking out for me before I knew who she was. Our friendship grew out of me being the first secretary of CND, and her being the third secretary. What I thought I was doing being secretary of CND at the age of nineteen, is a story best left for another time.  After years of her waiting to be useful to me I had confided my sense of loss with her after having a horribly necessary discussion with my mother. Sue tapped her contacts in the building trade and found me a recently renovated flat a few doors down from where she lived. The move was both physical and emotional for me. At the age of twenty five I made my first move in my own right to be less reliant on my mother.

Mother and I had been close for years. Our closeness seemed like a given. She would have been better for having female friends her own age, or younger, but she tended to freeze when faced with the choice of making new friendships. The character of my father would have had something to do with it. The parental house was his domain and a place where his dependents felt uncomfortable bringing their friends to. In 1985 new stories appeared about how I had been raised in the parental house that put her role in those times in a harsh light. Even with the change of address that gave me a greater sense of autonomy I could no more stop her from doing my laundry twice a week any more than King Cnut could stop the tide by placing his throne on the shore and bid the waves 'Stay back.', as he reputed had done in Gainsborough nearly 1000 years earlier. I was happy to make lunch for her when she came round several times a week. We were both people who were forced to present bad choices we had agreed to, as if they were better choices than they seemed. Neither of us was convincing. Tentatively mother and I relearned how to be friends again as recovered from feeling thoroughly scapegoated by family life. I made sure she knew why I had felt the way I did. Before this she had omitted to share some painful truths with me, when the experiencing the pain might have been more healing in the long term.

I would have liked Mother to be friends with my friend, Sue Hethershaw. They met once, in Sue's house. The disengagement that Mother showed made it plain I was on my own with that wish.

Did I say I was a people pleaser? I should have from the way my family had previously attached such a sense of duty to living out relative poverty. I was likeable but I lacked personal drive. My education would have been explained away as 'he is a late developer', as if to expiate the education system's choices for me. I could not drive, or learn to drive, but I successfully covered for that with being accomplished at hitching local lifts. With each change of address I found away from my parents house the more I accepted my homosexuality, which my family always denied. But the people-pleaser became part of me accepting that I was gay, where the more my had randomised my life the more vehemently my family claimed that there was some great plan that was mine to find, theirs to leave me to find. I would be unsurprised if the 'people pleaser' part of me, along with some painful experiences that I had absorbed, were what had made me secretive about the randomised casual sex of my cottaging. Random anonymity defies explanation and resists rationality. Even when the line from my parents was 'Get a job, just any job.', as if all jobs were alike. Though to be fair to the people whose job applications were frequently rejected, many jobs were alike-they were an invitation to accept rejection. With a comfortable flat, and my time more my own, and a few men who were mildly uncomfortable with themselves to visit me, and express their discomfort in sexual terms, the better to get the discomfort to temporarily subside I was doing okay. 

Where, for their own convenience, people saw me as heterosexual, then to further rationalise the lack of girlfriend, or interest in women, they added that I was a slow developer, to avoid recognising how I had developed. I.e. I was gay but I had no guide in that area of my life. What I offered instead was support to help me pretend that I was heterosexual, to help me fit in with the heterosexual herd. 

As a member of a church/Bible study house group I was invited to the wedding of two mature people who were key members of the group. They were friendly towards me, so why would I not attend the wedding service? My recollection of the marriage service is as clear as day to me, still. As the couple took their vows I had a panic attack which I had to suppress whilst having to acknowledge that everything that was in front of me was the life I was never going to have. All I would ever know would be a semi-permanent isolation and a sense of dislocation where I would always described myself as not who I was. I would never be able to argue for who I felt myself to be with clear conviction.

As a people pleaser my fantasy job was that of being a male nurse, a delusion that the further away from the training for it that I was kept, the stronger the delusion remained. When I finally made formal contact with the head office of a nearby training hospital they dashed my hopes so casually that I could barely believe how they did it. After that I was left to wonder what to aspire to. Removing the delusion of wanting to train as a nurse helped me make one decision. I was not going to attempt more 'O' levels, nor take on 'training' where there was no ongoing contract with the employer attached to the training. From now on I was going to take it as read that the best advice to me from the local careers office was always better for them than it was going to be for me. At the right moment I would politely point this out to them and agree to their plan but make it clear to them that they had the I was just their helper. Their plan was for their gain, not mine. My escape started from there.

Please left click here for Chapter Two.