We saw Sophie today and she told me that mum has been in contact with her three times in the past six months. The first time she sent her a message saying she had stopped drinking and was feeling great and was hoping to build bridges and rejoin the family. The second time she was hammered and emotional and saying she was considering suicide. The third time was a vitriolic facebook message calling Sophie every unpleasant name ever used in the English language and saying her life had gone to shit the second she had given birth. So her decades of turmoil and turbulence are all our fault apparently. Nice to have offspring to blame for the shitstorm you’ve created of your own existence.
It got me thinking though - my reluctance to be a parent myself is almost certainly down to my own experiences of parenting. How can I be expected to know how to raise a child when I was basically fending for myself as an infant? My older sister was the closest thing I ever had to a mother, and she was making it up as she went along and trying to deal with her own problems at the same time. Is it any wonder none of us are particularly enthusiastic about bringing children into the world? It would be like someone who’d never seen a guinea pig being given one to raise as a pet, or putting someone in charge of a multinational company whose only experience of business was having a boss who beat the shit out of him and blamed him for everything, or maybe electing someone President who had absolutely no background in politics and was then expected to deal with an increasingly unstable and problematic collection of world leaders.
God help us/me.
RC 12-8-17
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