The shape of family

The shape of my family was not what I thought, I see now as I look back.

Mother, father, child, yes; but in the shapes and structures of our days, in the movements of our daily worlds, there was one driving force, one strong will holding the tiller, guiding the decisions that needed to be made, and held to, the plans that needed to be formed and followed, that oversaw the making of the many invisible brickworks that housed our shared life.

We were the expression of her desire to have a family, late in her life as she realised her time to have this was running out. A swiftly-imagined marriage to a younger man; a son adopted in clear sight of the risks of age; a profound uprooting from one side of the world to the other; and the re-forming of her own days to encase these things, all and together. Sacrifices made, and grasped, and grappled with for three lifetimes after.

The costs to her - the true, lived costs - have only become clear, slowly, with my own accumulation of years. The appreciation of what she was, and is, and will always be to me, emerging with the same clarity.

She shaped the people we were: the child, growing in the glow of a strong, fierce, indulgent woman; and a man lacking that draw to some North Star within, needing but never knowing the absence of a centre in himself.

We were her place in the world; and the child more so than the man.

What she wanted, hoped for, struggled with, and for, throughout our family's life - those things held her hard to the course she set, through storms and shocks and, later, a man's quiet failure.

- - -

I now understand that she'd learned early in their marriage that my father was not just not-very-good at these things, but that he was in fact incapable of them. In my own judgement, looking back in these later years, I believe he was actually and actively impaired; most likely by a form of early-spectrum Asperger's syndrome, leaving him quite literally unable to understand, or process, or connect with, certain elements of daily life. In later years, I came to understand through a gradual closeness that developed with our wider, previously-distant, family - that these were essentially shared experiences; they had been through the same with their father, my father's brother.

Something in the blood, and not simply as my mother had wondered, a cultural clash between England and everywhere-else.

My childhood is littered in memory with moments of confusion, shock, anger, frustration at things said, and done; and not said, and not done; at statements made that shouldn't have been, and vice versa. In the simplest terms, this was a man who could not grasp the difference between a joke and an insult and who, as a result, had never had a friend. And who, sadly, has never understood that, or even - that I can see - noticed the fact.

Now, in what are my father's last handful of years, he slips further from the reality around him and - importantly - further from what we, my mother and I, had mistakenly assumed to be the learned decencies of a family life.

Now, for him, anything goes. Now, compounded by a lifetime's impairment, any lie, any dodge of any truth that diverts responsibility, is just, and right, and becomes his new truth. Alternative facts, but written small, across one lost, old man.

Now, any concealment is proof by its absence. That a result, or response, did not arise from an action or a statement, a foolishness or mistake is evidence that nothing need be addressed. Today, if there was no result, then no action preceded it, and so there is no lie in saying "nothing needs to be addressed, as nothing was seen to happen".

The adage goes 'if a tree falls in the woods, and no-one is there to hear it, did it make any sound?' The trees now collapse to the ground in the woods of my father's mind, a forest floor thickly, heavily, silently matted with the moss and fuzz of old age, and Parkinson's Disease, and what I now see was a full lifetime of small, but deeply damaged - and damaging - impairment.

The final, sad defeat of this is that the cuckoo in this family's nest was not ever, in truth, in the nest at all.

And that, because he was in no way capable of understanding this, he may never have truly been said to have been here.