On power and forgiveness

Adults have such power over children. We forget as we grow older.

When my daughter cries because I have shouted at her for not staying in bed, I feel a mild irritation. She winds her arms around my neck, ‘But I love you too much,’ she sobs, ‘don’t go, don’t go away’.

Bedtime, I insist, remove her arms and tuck her firmly, still reaching out for me, beneath the sheets.

I go downstairs and pour a glass of wine, check my email. I forget within seconds. Later I come upstairs to find a note by my door “Sory Mumy I wont do it agin”. Below the writing, two stick figures, one dwarfing the other, hold hands. In her bed she has fallen asleep, her hair a tangle of tears across her flushed cheek.

I remember, not the clashes of my early childhood – fierce though they could be – but the struggles of my teenage years. The years in which I became aware of the naked structure of power that exists between adults and children.

Adults had physical power over you. They could hit you and control you, but that was not where their true power lay. They had emotional power over you – their scolding, criticisms and sneers were wounding. But even that power faded eventually. Under my blank-eyed gaze, I recall how they would crescendo in shouting then stutter into silence.

No. Their real power was economic. It was in the food they gave you, the shelter they provided, the means of delivering you to adulthood to which they held the keys. You were dependent upon them. And from that flowed their power. It allowed them to enforce obedience, exact gratitude, demand submission. The pain that never faded was rage at your own helplessness, the bitter swallowing down of anger each day, each night, because you saw so clearly that there was nothing you could do.

Perhaps if they loved you, dependence was bearable. But when they did not love you, when they hated you, although they pretended they did not, when they wrapped their hatred in a burning cloak of self-righteous justification for their power, then it was unbearable. Except that nothing is truly unbearable because you must bear it.

I thought often about my choices.

I could run away. I had no money. I had no means of getting money. I was a child. I instinctively knew that a life on the streets would be an escape to more powerlessness at the whim of other adults. I was old enough to know what rape and prostitution were.

I could ask for help. When you are a child you believe that adults dispense justice like the deus ex machine at the end of a play. You do not yet understand that people prefer convenience to justice; are more concerned by social embarrassment than a child’s welfare. Relatives, neighbours, family friends, teachers… these people do not want to be troubled. They congratulate themselves on listening to you. They refuse to hear or discount as untrue anything that would make them take action. They wrap up their advice in words culled from magazine articles. What it amounts to is this. Suffer. Survive. It is, in the end, good advice.

I could grow up. This, I realised, was the only real route out. To not be reliant on them for anything. To remove their power and the basis of their power forever. This route meant taking their food, their shelter and their education. It meant swallowing down the helplessness and the anger until you could be free. It meant passing exams, excelling where possible, going to university, because although limited independence might be had earlier, university meant true independence. It meant earning money, enough money that the freedom and independence became certainties.

The only problem was that it took time.

I was 13 when it began. Luck and the determination to excel meant I was able to leave for university a year early – at 17. I graduated at 20 and went straight to a job and a house of my own. I was free.

It meant I had to survive 7 years. Admittedly only for 4 of them was I completely in their power; for 3 I was away, but still aware that they had power over me, that the food I ate and the bed I slept in was paid for by their money.

I suffered. I survived. I did fine.

I count the costs. I did not choose the career I preferred because it would have involved further dependence, or more uncertainty of independence. I am unable to ask for help and find it hard to accept when given. I am obsessed with having enough money. I went through the usual self-harm with alcohol, drugs and sex. I still struggle not to envy those with mothers, those who have help with childcare, who do not dread Christmases. Occasionally a bitter unhappiness rises up and overwhelms me.

Hardly that bad. Pretty first-world problems when it comes to comparing the scars of childhood.

I am writing this in my childhood home. I am so free of their power that I can return here. I can listen to sharp words and sneers, ignore poisoned silence or cold disapproval, allow demands for gratitude or acknowledgement to wash over me unmoved.

I have all the power now. I can walk away, of course. But more, I have proved time and again that walking away exposes their own powerlessness, blows a harsh wind over their vulnerability, their loneliness, their emotional need. Just occasionally, irritated by pointed remarks, I hint at leaving early or not inviting them for Christmas. As I see the anxiety well up, the scrabbling to take back words without losing face, I feel pity. I remind myself that when power is absolute, there is little need to show it. The very rich can be generous; the very secure are merciful.

Is that why adults feel the need to exercise power on children? Because we are so aware of its limits; of how soon we lose control of their bodies, and then their love. Do we wield power now in fear at how little we have?

I leave the computer and walk upstairs to my daughter’s bedroom. The beat of my heart rests here. One day I will cease to be centre of her world, but she will remain mine. Hers is the real power. Indeed, I fight the urge to submit to it – to give her anything she wants, to have her always happy. Anger flames and burns out in a second, a flimsy feeling quenched by love. However different teenage years, however difficult, I find it hard to believe this will not hold true.

But if she were not my daughter, if I were her step-mother, would there be anything that could help me? Would justice harden into self-righteousness; the desire to do right degrade into domination?

Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum was about parents. We begin by loving them. We end by judging them. Rarely, if ever, do we forgive them.

Do I forgive? Either the step-parent or the parent who permitted it?

I kneel at my daughter’s bedside, her cheek once more smooth and unstained by tears, her body instinctively curled towards my presence.

As I hope to be forgiven in turn?

And still I cannot answer.