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

My new cleaner and more constructive approach to communications with my family was to adapt the lines of reasoning explained in the layman's therapy paperback book 'I'm Okay Your Okay' by Thomas A. Harris, which I had read recently. It 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. I would have heard about the Thomas Harris title via the book that inspired the title of this blog 'Families And How to Survive Them', written by Robin Skynner and John Cleese. More layman's therapy advice. Though I would also have known about the victim persecutor and rescuer flip flop from reading about it in 'Depression: the way out of your prison', by Dorothy Rowe which was the first layman's therapy book that I had read in 1985. It had been a great help to m when I had to retrieve myself from the over controlling influence of my mother, six years earlier.

However much reading those book titles explained to me how these roles flipped into each other, and flipped again, I could only do this for myself. When I heard such unaware repetitions in the church and from within my family the best I could do was inwardly roll my eyes and try to move the conversation on before the speaker dug in and went for the next role change in the cycle.

The first contact with family in the new year came from mother. One mid week evening I was at home and the phone rang. My landlady picked it up and handed the cordless phone to me. I went into the space under the stairs in Agape house that was the private space for taking phone calls. The call was from my mother, who spoke to me in conspiratorial tones, which was a warning sign in itself. 'Hello love. I have got to be brief. I am using Ted's phone. But I have something to tell you. It is about your grandad. He fell down the stairs from the landing of his first floor flat two weeks ago. An ambulance collected him and he is comfortable in John Coupland hospital. They are keeping him in. We don't know what is going to happen. But we have seen him in hospital. Via his neighbour, young Michaela, we have collected and brought him clothes and everything he needs from his flat to make his hospital stay comfortable. I will be in touch when there is more to tell.'. I knew from the moment that mother said she was using Ted's phone that, the nature of the news apart, that this conversation was going to be easier to listen to, whatever the news she had to share, than expected. Ted was a friend to her. He was a pillar reason and tactful helpfulness to mother when her sense of reason projected itself into some wild blue yonder. I was glad of the support that Ted and Nora, his wife's, gave for mother. I trusted their reasoning more than I trusted hers.   

Gran, Grandad's wife had died four years earlier that month. So it was not as if I did not know the sense of direction. Back then I had just left Gainsborough to start care work in Nottingham. Modest as my job was, it was the start of my life opening out in more ways than I thought possible before I left the town. It did not matter to me that when I arrived in Nottingham other people could clearly recognise that I lacked a sense of direction, work experience, and ambition. There was always enough change happening around me in Nottingham for me to absorb those changes. 

With grandad was in hospital any news I got about him would be from mother and via Ted. It would be slow and late to be shared, and understate the state of his health. I would be the last to know whether this was the hospital's doing, where they routinely blurred what might be read between the lines they had to report, so as to keep more information to themselves, or whether it was mother's doing which was more understandable given how she had her feelings for her father. There, limited as she knew herself to be, she had done her best to keep him out of hospital and well supported at home, where the one thing she could not stop him feeling was how much he missed his wife of over sixty years. 

In Nottingham I was looking for the big change. After fifteen months of nightly journaling I was still committed to it, but was now less sure of why I was still doing it, beyond the arguments that kept me awake were still keeping me awake. But I did wonder when the call up for the group therapy might come and what sign I might recognise as the cue to stop writing. When I started I had no external cue to start writing, so I did not know what sort of cue would be the thing to make me stop. Without discussing the matter or sharing the journal with anyone I thought I had written out a lot 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. Quantifying what shame remained unexplored and unexposed was impossible without me being assessed and getting the assessor's point of view. 

A less socially isolated, less church-based, person than me would have at this point made their acquaintance with Nottingham Gay Helpline, as part of their attempt at vocalising their 'coming out', and slowly transferred their reliance on journaling and the secrecy of cottaging to conversations with live human beings. I had contacted them twice, both times amid some 'fight or flight' response to a situation. Both times my haste meant that I did not make the best use of my contact with them. What I should have shared with them got confined to the journal. But in regard to my being gay, I did not know how to challenge myself to be less defensive over how thoroughly I had been taught how to 'do without', 'be self reliant' and 'make do and mend my closet'. If I was my own worst enemy I was the last to recognise it.

Whoever my enemies were, including parts of myself, elements of the church were on the list. The church wanted me to stay quietly closeted, and imagined that it was a secure comfortable place. It wasn't. The more they wanted me to ignore that I was gay, the more fraught the engineered ignorance became. 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, and silent in the public toilets, seeking respite, does not leave me feeling isolated? Please think again'.

Meanwhile Grandad was living out his own companion free isolation in hospital, the same way gran had four years earlier. There, his health declined whilst the language that people used towards him, around him, and farther out into the world, as news about him was reported, disguised his decline. I was getting very little of the reports, no doubt because I was so far away, and because it was also thought that I was better off not knowing what I either could not change, or that I was not to know what what other people thought it better to kept to themselves.  

Maybe those who told me nothing had a point. Both they and I were past the point of replaying fractious old grievances to defend claiming a better life that we thought the other person should not be asking for. Or we ought to be.

Please left click here for Chapter Thirty Three.