thanks angela.
You are right that this post has brought up some ... interesting feelings within me. The problem is that I have felt like the grown up for some long time. For whatever reason, my parents are simple and behave like they are not particularly smart. They have no self-awareness. However, I am really very smart - with all the good and the bad that entails - and am full of self-awareness. This is a good thing.
For a long time things have been 'ok' with my parents, as I suggest - the whole maiden aunt at tea thing - and it's all been very polite. What I perhaps haven't gotten across so well is the breakthrough I am trying to achieve in talking to my parents openly. My mum fears me - all these things in the first post I mentioned - and they are all things that have ONLY really happened when I try and talk about my own needs. I could go back to 'normal' and we would have a pleasant enough time. But something tells me that is not enough. I don't want my parents to say 'sorry' to me. I don't really want them to change. But I can't - although that would be fine (in the Southern sense of the word - figure out how to produce this adult relationship which everyone seems keen to bring about. Perhaps a part of my subconcious is hoping that, if we .... a thought occurs I NEVER REBELLED! ... had some of those feelings out in the open that are so well hidden by my parents, then I would feel more affectionately towards them; I would feel affectionate. If I see my mum in my mind's eye now, I don't really feel like I want to hug her; I'm not sure I could even love her at present. And this is odd, because she is a sweet person. I think there are a bunch of issues in my past that would take too long to go into here, that are probably at the root cause. I chose to go to boarding school, but when I got there, I was very unhappy and ran away. They dragged me back there one end-of-half-term. Also, the happy go lucky person that my mother is today is quite different from the depressed, argumentative, poverty-stricken and faced with her husband's bankruptcy and house repossession lady that brought me up. We grew up poor, no doubt about it. I have always felt that something lurked in my past regarding some kind of cruelty from my mother. I remember at a very young age being significantly depressed when she returned to my grandmother, her mother's house, to pick me up after a weekend. I can still remember the gloom that dawned within me. That's odd, no? I always dream about my grandmother's house (from where I was dragged that time, aged eleven, and where I spent so many a happy weekend) whereas I never dream of my family home, which was old (18th century) small and ill-considered in layout, similarly to how i figure my care from my parents was. They are slapdash. THey don't know HOW to care for stuff - themselves, careers, future - and it has taken me such a long time to learn how to do all this stuff to realise my fairly obviously considerable potential. An alternative me (I am deputy editor on a successful magazine) would have temped worked in a bookshop bummed around lived off dole ... you name it. So I am angry, relieved, worried, concerned ... and all at two of the most benign and kindest (when not riled) people in the world. Go figure! I also have a streaming cold.
Thanks for your time.
love
Michael x
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