SO IRONIC
Prompt - So Ironic : Write about an ironic situation you've been in throughout your life.
This should have been a prompt which inspired a fictional story. Or perhaps some half-amusing look back at part of my life. But there's only one ironic situation I seem able to think of, to the exclusion of others, and it won't allow my to fictionalise it, while there is little amusement on offer.
My relationship with my mother was rarely an easy one. Late in life she'd tell me she knew she was a difficult person to put up with. And certainly there were times when I could look back and understand why my father almost left her - indeed did for a short period - twice. A lot of it lay in her upbringing of course, and the mental twists that added to her character.
She, one of four sisters, was farmed out to a widowed aunt when she was still young, perhaps only about twelve or so. She would form a strong familial bond with the aunt - Aunt Ina - but seems to have always harboured a hurt of rejection from having to leave her parents, some form of branding that marked her as different. At the same time two of the three siblings were jealous, thinking their sister had been singled out for special treatment in some way. From such occurrences are long lasting resentments and grudges spawned. Ultimately it would lead to them falling out for good when their mother died (the other, neutral, sister, the only one never to marry and perhaps the only person in my mother's family with whom I found myself identifying, had died long before). For the final twenty years of her life she had no contact with either of the others, and I didn't bother to try and inform them of her demise. I had no idea where they were, if they were still alive, and cared not one bit.
She had a strong desire to... I was going to say 'better herself', but that's not true. She didn't have enough self confidence to imagine that she could ever be like her 'betters'. She felt she knew her place in society and all she could do within those boundaries was make life comfortable for her family, and be seen to be behaving respectably. Those few words at the end of that sentence contain a lifetime of guilt and anguish and puzzlement.
While she wanted me to go to university and have a different life to the one she and my dad had, she didn't want me to become one of those 'betters' she seemed almost fearful of. I was something to be controlled, or at least moulded, which I always kicked against yet always ended up conforming. But when I started to have some creative urges, through writing and eventually trying to learn to play music, she, unlike my father, was not overly enthusiastic. Years later, when they came to see me performa in a stage play, something I think they only managed to do twice in the list of twenty or so productions I appeared in, it felt like she was trying to make the 'right' noises, whilst being baffled by my wanting to pareade myself in front of people like that. People like us didn't do things like that, that was for our 'betters' - ? I might be misjudging her, but that was what it felt like.
I never felt like I'd done well enough. I was encouraged to 'improve', but to what purpose I'm not sure. She didn't value learning as a benefit in it's own right, but as a means to do something. At least my father had some artistic side to him. This cold criticism would extend into my personal life, especially my relationships with women. I was warned, I was told not be over emotional, and when I got involved with a married woman that was very much my own fault - it came too close to home I think. When I suddenly announced I was getting married she was surprised. But there was good reason for that - I'd told her little about Julie, for fear of what I'd get back in return. She was not an easy woman to confide in.
Life went on, the parents retired, mellowed a bit. Well, a lot in my dad's case, hardly at all in my mum's. She had been outraged that I'd left my wife for a married woman, couldn't accept that there was any fault other than my own. For about two years she wouldn't even speak to, indeed of, Barbara. If she had to be mentioned she was 'that woman'. It would change in time. But it was interesting that barbara said she was much easier to get on with when I was't around. Perhaps because she wasn't constantly having to look for things to be critical of? We did make the mistake of going on a week's holiday with them, in France. That experience was never repeated. My mother wanted to do everything herself...
Where's the irony in all this? My dad died in 2002, suicide, and my mother blamed herself. She felt, I think, she'd driven him to it. While she might have been annoying I don't think that was the case at all. But it was hard to disagree when she said that bit about being difficult to live with. I went up on my own far more than I had before, to do the jobs she could't do. I would never be doing them right, I wasn't doing them the way Harry would have. Why she couldn't trust me I don't know. The one bit of praise I recall from that period was being told I was a better driver than my father. Mind you, she also had a phobia about music being played in the car...
And so to the final, ironic, period. Miserable for almost three years, seeming to hate herself, and therefore me more, I realised how much my dad had protected me from her worst behaviour. She was hard work, and this was when I wondered how he'd managed to stay with her all those decades. It all changed when she got her diagnosis. Terminal lung cancer. Might last a year, maybe longer. This transformed her - into a better person, at least as far as our relationship was concerned. Suddenly I could be trusted, I could do everything, I was the perfect son (and Barbara the perfect daughter in law!). In the final two months, which she spent in a hospice, we became best friends. I felt like I was being shown off to her new (and very temporary) friends who shared the accommodation with. It was a strange feeling, one I wished we could have had at other times in our lives. But only imminent death, a welcome end as far as she was concerned, brought that change. Now that's ironic, isn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment