Where were the parents?
Is Emotional Absence A Form Of Neglect?
Six months ago, my father died, and as far as I know went to his grave without ever having cause to acknowledge or deal with what happened to me as a child.
It’s close to ten years since my mother went, but as she spent the six pre-departure years shrouded in dementia, it’s been longer-still since she was in a position to even begin to approach the topic.
I waited. Even though neither of them played any part in the acts themselves, I waited. I spared them. I spared them this.
They were different times back then, is what people say. The brutality of two world wars almost back-to-back left their mark on the generations of the twentieth century, and I accept that — from the perspective of one who has lived in comparative peace, prosperity and stability, achieved through the sacrifices of those who came before.
In our time, COVID forces behaviours and practices on our offspring that will damage them in ways we cannot yet know, but still, we love them. We tell them.
Perhaps to feel unloved by my parents was an unfair affectation, concocted after the fact to explain or excuse myself during intervening years as an ill-fitting justification that failed to reflect true history. At the time, I don’t think I even had the language or the experience to work that out for myself. Contact was offered. Contact that included skin on skin connection. My need was the only imperative.
I placed myself willingly in those circumstances in lieu of all else, despite its inherent, instinctive wrongness. I did as I was told and did it whenever I could.
In a puritanically straight-laced household where even the acts of going to the bathroom verged on the taboo — avoiding any reference to the anatomical components involved — vocabulary was not available, and so borrowed, made-up words became the norm, spoken in whispers and never near parents. A child might have the power to speak out, but what with? And why?
I wanted it. I liked it. I would do anything to keep on going and to relish in it whenever it was called for.
How too would either my mother or father raise the subject, even if they knew? Shame held everyone’s tongue. Held theirs until they were dead and buried, and beyond ever having to reveal what perhaps they suspected.
One issue other after another was brushed under the carpet in that house. I see the genetics of procrastination in my own self too, and realise I did not lick that up off the ground.
So I waited. I waited to save them from the shame of it. I waited to save myself the shame of it, and became a master of maintaining illusion.
That’s all it’s been. Illusion. The shame was not saved, it remained all along. An impenetrable wall of it stood between myself and my parents for the whole of my life.
It kept me from ever telling them I loved them, from ever hugging them, from speaking or seeing my father in the months before his death, even though I knew where he was heading.
Was it shame that kept them from telling me? From touching me?
Shame was victorious.
Shame remains victorious.
