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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13780
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I went to visit my mother. She's knocking on a bit, 86 last birthday. It was important to help her sort out her finances. She's short of money and lives in a house that has cash tied up in it and is a waste. So we worked out how to get her an income from bricks and mortar. That was ok.
That house is a place I have all my childhood memories in. It is a few days older than I am. They moved in just before I was born. And I inhabited it. And today I found I was about to burst into tears in the living room of my mother's house because the memories all came crowding in.
I don't really have any good memories there. It was the cold house I lived in. It was the house I was ill in, so ill as an infant I was never expected to live. It;s the house I fought them over medicine in. The house I was "smacked" in, the house I had no room in to call my own, but had to move between rooms whenever different aunts came to claim "their bedroom". It was the house I was forced to do homework in, and the house I had to leave each day to got to school 5 miles away, by train in the early years, by bike down a hellish busy major road. It was the house friends would only come to once, never twice. It was a house where I felt always in trouble and never "at home"
And I nearly showed her how badly it hurts me. And she would never have understood, because she is all "stiff upper lip for the neighbours"
I was never at home there. I lived there. Watched, poked, prodded and pried into but never seen. I grew up eventually, but not there.
I have no emotion for my mother. She is a small, plump grey haired woman I happen to know. I'm not even sad about that. I just see it. She never knew me then. She doesn't know me today. She just sails serenely through life knowing she got something wrong, but never understanding that it was MOTHERHOOD she failed at
It was the house where no-one was abnormal. Everything was "just so". No cat no dog, not even a pet ant.
I feel very low this evening. I have done all day
I went and sat for an hour on Epsom Downs today overlooking my old world. And I saw London. Impersonal and as vast as my little life was small
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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smith
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On fire! |
Registered: January 1970
Messages: 1095
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That was just a house where you kept your things and stayed out of the rain. I'm so sorry your mom was like that when you were growing up, and it will always be part of you. But...we take what we're given and we create a person. You took all that and became the person you are today. You sound as if you think it made you less somehow, but it didn't. The lacks made you stronger and the wants let you find people to love.
Your mom won't change now. She prolly doesn't even see a need to try. That is not for you to worry over. You do what you need for her so that you never have regrets, but don't worry about what you don't seem to feel. The past is gone, the present is what needs tending.
All our lives are small, just a fingersnap in the scheme of things. You've made yours remarkable with your family, your friends and this site. It's good to sit and look down on your old life for awhile, but then you stand up, sadly shake your head and smile because your 'now' life is what matters.
Yesterday is over....I hope today is a smileworthy day
smith
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13780
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Yesterday was yesterday. I don't feel special, though. Nor was anything about being in any way special. I just had a weird and awful day yesterday.
Things came to get me. And I had a huge flashback to thinking I was happy because I could stand next to John. And then I realised as I sat in my car on Epsom Downs, that I was happy then because of it, but that happiness was illusory. And that was hard to say to myself or to hear. And yet I have said it often enough before.
I went there because I saw ghosts. What I saw was fat men on a golf course on a damp half misty day.
I am smiling today.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Shawn
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Toe is in the water |
Registered: July 2004
Messages: 69
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{{{{hugs}}}}
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Timmy, I think your reactions and feelings are natural. I am not at all sure that if most of us now mature males had grown up in an emotionally functional family that we would be what we are today. Like you, I had an acute emotional aversion to my mother - one that I cannot explain even to this day. (I did not have this aversion until I reached 'years of discretion'.)I don't think that there is anything wrong in the emotions that you felt: the important thing is not to feel guilty about them. To a great extent we are what our parents (or their substitutes) - positively or negatively - made us. Our biggest success is when we succeed in life and come to terms with ourselves in spite of all that emotional baggage. Hugging you very tightly.
The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least. (Richard Dawkins, 2006)
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Timmy, I am so sorry for your bad day. Those days are never fun to have, but as we walk through them ~ embracing those issues we need to deal with, we then come out better people on the other side. We simply need to let what we are feeling touch us. It sounds like you embraced what you were going through, and each day you become better for it.
Like you, I was also raised by a very cold, fairly stern mother who drank too much and was divorced and remarried. I always asked why I wasn't allowed to live with my dad who was stable, kind, and fun to be with...
But I wasn't. I ran away, got married, had kids and basically screwed up my adult life until I got divorced for the second time and embraced my life, and who and what I am.
Your mother will probably never be happy, Timmy. That is up to you. You are doing so many things positive with your life and family, and that speaks volumes about your character as a man. You are being honest, helpful and forthright in your walk.
I used to look at our life as something we have to do every day. The older I get, the more I embrace my life as a journey. I encourage you to continue your journey with your head held high, your heart full of love, and bearing truth all the way !!!
Good job, Timmy. Press on...
Paul (bambam)
Celebrate your life... embrace your love... Become intimate with your place in forever !!!
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13780
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bambam wrote:
> I used to look at our life as something we have to do every day. The older I get, the more I embrace my life as a journey. I encourage you to continue your journey with your head held high, your heart full of love, and bearing truth all the way !!!
It feels like something I have to do each day, you know. This is probably not helped by my not having a contract at present so I am between incomes! But that is the way of the freelance consultant.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Timmy, since I have been coming here and reading and writing posts, I have shared in what you have gone through as I read what you wrote...
quite a journey, if I do say so myself; and though we don't necessarily enjoy the immediate feeling of our present experiences, they do help us to change who and what we are to carry on through our life.
Yes, you do have to do those things every day, Timmy. We all do in our own life and our own way...
I just encourage you to continue to walk on as you have. Your presence in our lives has changed all of us. Mine for sure. I encourage you to keep on.
My thoughts are with you as well !!
Hugs,
BamBam
Celebrate your life... embrace your love... Become intimate with your place in forever !!!
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