pinkfloydpsw's Blog

When I got him he was quiet, I say got him because he was something that I had to accept as part of the package, I loved his mother you see. Of course he became much more than that to me in time. A quiet young man with little to say for himself, his gran spoke for him mostly and to know him in these early days was to know what she wanted him to be. He first came to live with me when he was 9. He was very well mannered and very unproblematic, but that was the problem, he shouldn’t have been. I remember being 9 years old, you’re just beyond the curiosity of young life, where you ask questions of everything because you understand nothing, and firmly into feelings of curiosity about yourself and what you want from life. This boy didn’t have a self, he was merely a representation of what he had been expected to be and become. His gran and his mum decided what he should like and provided it for him. I don’t think anyone ever asked him what he would really like before I came along.

One day I asked granny “does he really like playing that instrument?”, Immediately she replied “yes”, and very confidently. I asked him the same question, he wasn’t sure what to say so I told him “you can be honest with me, do you like playing that instrument?”, “No, not really” was his answer. Next I asked him if he liked going to that sports club, again I had to let him know that it was okay if he didn’t. He hated it, he really really hated it. You get the picture then? This boy went along with what was foisted upon him by dominant female family members and rarely, if ever, expressed his own desires. I asked him what he would like to do if he could do anything instead, he said “I did something with the school, that was good”. So I set about making it happen, this didn’t please gran or mum initially. We found a club and I took him on Saturdays, he progressed well and still does it to this day, he probably always will.

The boy had little in the way of friends, he was an only child and he had his grandparents steering his growing up. They put him in an expensive private school, fed him well, kept him overly safe and I am sure their intentions were noble. The problem is that they didn’t let him discover who he was and where he came from. They projected onto him what they thought he should be. His mother told me horror stories about his real dad, too many and too expansive to be true, this guy was either getting a bad press or he was the devil incarnate. The boy had been told these stories too and with his real dad not there to represent a differing perspective he had believed them of course. I would learn many years later that a wolf devil had been created to stand in place of what may have been a joint failure and a marriage breakdown. This was done to carefully protect the saintly and always perfect perspective that the boy was supposed to have concerning his mother and his grandmother. Granny ruled with an iron fist, she ruled his mother and so she ruled him, I set out to undo that and I succeeded only partially. He still, to this day reaches out for strong older-female validation. I suspect this will manifest itself later on but I won’t be around to witness that, thankfully.

I suspect also, because I have learned to my own cost, that the damage was undoable by an external influence. A person can only be guided toward discovering themselves if they wish to participate in that goal; the only people you can help are those that want to be helped. He doesn’t, he is grown now and and he has the false confidence of youth, like his dad told me recently “I thought I knew everything at 18” when recognising his own mistakes in the early days of fatherhood and being a young husband. The boy will not learn anything now, he maybe never learned anything from me at all, but at least I tried.

I found his dad recently online, he is happy to be back in his son’s life in some way, to undo the devilry and maybe to help the boy. On the face of it he seems not to be the devil at all, he married again and has raised a stepson and his own child with his wife while progressing his own successful career. They moved to Australia and are building their dream home, 13 years married in a happy solid family. Does this sound like the devil to you? My ex had a chequered existence between him and I, she said thirty lovers to me once, then me with 5 pretty good years followed by 5 years of passive aggressive torture and control until I could take no more, (I’m in therapy to get past it). I’ll no doubt be the devil now but I don’t care. Finding the boy’s dad was my last good act in this drama.

The boy says little still, he thinks but does not reveal anything, he’s quiet since his mum and I split. I think he’s waiting for her to tell him what he should think. The major damage was done to him long before I got him, only my naivety and my hubris allowed me to think I could fix him, the same traits about me that helped me fail to fix his mother. I’m not sure if broken people can be fixed, a friend told me recently “stay away from them, they only break you too”. It was foolish of me to try, in the final analysis I didn’t fix anything, I just made it okay for him to be broken for a while.

The question is this, was he ruined by his experience and his childhood treatment? or does what I know of his family concerning their repeating issues of both control and overly insulated ill-gotten confidence in their own superiority play the biggest role? Is this nature or nurture that makes this boy what he is now? Unreachable and shit-grinningly unaffected by what should be deeply troubling events. His emotional distance is visceral, he feels nothing at all and has less to say. Ten years with him, 9 years his most actively participating parent and I am discarded by him as if I were a tissue he emptied his nostril into. I had wished to know him after all of this, I falsely assumed that we were close, that we had a bond, but I realise now I have never really known him and he has never really bothered getting to know me other than as a provider, a mere tool of his progression. Broken people, they break you…

Paul Simon Wilson