On the death of an abuser (by alaric)
At nearly midnight, there's a knock on the door; we had a busy evening and came home late and hungry so I ordered pizzas and we've been waiting for the knock. I open it; to the left stands a pizza delivery guy, pizza boxes in hand, looking nervously at the two police officers to the right.
"Er," says the pizza guy
"Uh, you go first," say the police.
He hands me the pizzas, and departs rapidly. I put the pizzas to one side, and prepare myself for what's coming.
Awkwardly, the two officers come in, ashen-faced, and inform me that my mother was found dead in her home.
I knew this was coming as soon as I saw the police car, mainly because earlier that day I had informed the police that I had not been able to contact my mother for a few days so I'd asked them to do a welfare check; she lived three hours' drive away so I couldn't easily just go there myself. So I can't say I was shocked. I felt tense, focused, knowing that a whole bunch of complicated tasks were about to fall into my lap, and an onerous sense of massive responsibility upon me.
But my main emotion was relief.
My mother and I hadn't met in nearly twenty years. At that meeting, when she came to meet her newborn grandchild, she accused me (as usual) of some kind of conspiracy against her. The pregnancy had nearly killed my wife, Sarah, and we'd had to move house during it as the place we had been renting didn't allow us to have children there; so I had spent months juggling my job, moving house across the country single-handedly as Sarah was too sick, and visiting her in hospital. During all that, I had not noticed my mother's fiftieth birthday come and go, and she took affront to the slight. As usual, she did not accept that this might have been an oversight on my part; she felt it had to have been a deliberate act to spite her, so she went through her all-too-familiar routine of cross-examining me to try and get my mask of lies to slip and reveal the truth she was looking for. And despite the fact she was now too physically frail to hurt me, and that I was no longer dependent on her for food and lodging so she couldn't starve me or throw me out, I was still terrified of her; the formative eighteen years I'd lived with her had so thoroughly programmed my reptilian hind-brain to register her as an existential threat that I was still terrified of her wrath.
But there was no lie, the truth was that I had lost track of the date amongst all the disruption. That wasn't the answer she was looking for, so she stormed off in a rage and subsequently refused to meet with any of us unless Sarah was not there (I'm pretty confident that the underlying problem was she felt threatened by me having a family of my own, and felt my wife was stealing me from her or loosening her control over me).
So I accepted her terms, refused to let her drive a wedge between my wife and I, and we would never meet again. After a short period of excommunication she dropped me an email asking what I and baby Jean might like for Christmas (not Sarah, though) and our relationship settled into a new, cautious, cold war; we would correspond via email, sharing carefully worded news on the family from my side or talk of her allotment and the cats from her side, and negotiate the exchange of Christmas and birthday presents; and I'd send her a card and a gift every Mother's Day. When that first child was old and wise enough to not be vulnerable to my mother's emotional manipulation I introduced them to each other via email, so she could know her grandmother and vice versa; I wanted to do the same for my youngest child in due course, but she died before I got the chance.
I had been terrified of my mother since very early in my life. It was just the two of us, along with our dogs and cats and occasional other pets; I had little contact with any other family, because they were Bad People. There were a lot of bad people; in fact most people were bad and it was an ongoing challenge to try and find the good ones. I didn't feel threatened by the bad people, they weren't scary - my mother said they were foolish and ignorant and selfish, only dangerous because of how many there were, the danger of a crowd or a stampeding herd. My fear was that I might accidentally become one of them. If I forgot something or made a mistake, I would be interrogated: Why had I made that mistake? Why had I forgotten? Was it because I thought I was better than everyone else, didn't want to pull my weight, felt doing things properly was beneath me? Often I would be stood in front of her in the middle of the room for hours, powerless before her baleful stare as she quizzed me; any inconsistency in my story, any sign of weakness in my body language, would be pounced upon and cross-examined in more depth; until, eventually, having failed to root out the corruption hiding within me, she would grudgingly accept that maybe I had just made a mistake after all, and allow me to sit down again.
So from an early age, fear was a constant, and growing, part of my life. The first times I was cross-examined I was surprised and taken aback, horrified and ashamed that I'd made a mistake, and resolving to never make a mistake again; but as it happened more and more I realised it was just part of life, a thing that will happen in the future, to be dreaded.
And there was a thing in the garden that I feared, although I had no idea why; I just panicked at the sight of it and couldn't go near it. Although I have happy memories of being in the garden as a very young child, beyond a certain point I never went into the garden unless I was forced to for some reason - which happened fairly often when I was sent to fetch coal for the fire. Once I was sent on such a mission and I stood there by the back door; in the light streaming out from it I could see it there waiting for me, and I tried to muster the courage to go out, or try to find a way to do what I had to do without having to see it. But while I stood there, my mother came to see why I hadn't come back with the coal yet as the fire was going out. When I reminded her that I was scared of the thing in the garden, she flew into a range, told me I was being stupid, and held a knife to my throat and told me to go and get the coal. I was more scared of the thing than the knife so I still refused to go outside; she threw the knife to the floor in disgust and stormed away, and I sank to my knees and sobbed.
Whatever horrendous event made me fear the thing in the garden remains a mystery; it either happened before I was old enough to form memories reliably, or it was so horrible I wiped it from my memories to contain the damage. I don't know.
My mother made it clear that we were better than other people; she was extremely intelligent, and looked down on how foolish and easily manipulated most people were. We were vegetarians, but they bought expensive meat made from animals raised in cruel conditions and murdered, and then they were squeamish and disgusted about it if they were made to actually consider this fact; further evidence that they were short-sighted unthinking morons. They were swayed by adverts, voted for populist politicians who made transparently false promises of easy answers to complex questions, were driven by short-term greed without thought for later consequences.
Teachers, compared to my mother, were trivial to manipulate. I was a horrible child for a while; not selfish (that would violate the core moral tenets my mother had drilled into me since birth, and those were tenets I had analysed and found good and decided to keep) - more what you might call chaotic neutral. Not yet having learnt better I had adopted a lot my mother's value system, and schools were an authoritarian power structure, and she hated those, so I had no compunction about sewing chaos purely for the sake of it; all the while being a model student, academically gifted and seemingly kind and helpful. Once a bully stole a roll of stickers from my pocket and ran off with it; I chased him, cut a corner to catch up with him, grabbed his head and swiftly slammed it into a brick wall (an act which I now realise could have resulted in a life-altering brain injury but, at the time, was calculated as the most efficient way to cause him maximal pain). I grabbed my stickers back then ran and got a teacher and told them how he'd stolen my stickers and, while I was chasing him, he'd tripped and banged his head and now he was bleeding and crying. As he was a known troublemaker and I was the model student who had gone and got help, his protestations that I'd done this to him were interpreted as an attempt to divert attention from his theft, and I walked away with a commendation; I had no difficulty in calmly, confidently, lying under pressure.
Another time, another kid saw me indulging my hobby of removing the fuses in the hand dryers in the toilets and reported me to a teacher; I did such a convincing job of being confused and not even understanding the accusation that, given their detailed description of the technique I used (and also being a known frequent troublemaker), they were then under suspicion of being behind the long-running problem of hand dryer vandalism (and if they'd searched me, they'd have never found my pocket toolkit because it was well concealed). Doing this sort of thing was exhilarating, and although I never told my mother about my escapades (because telling her anything, unprompted, was a risk), I felt that she would be proud of me if I had; because they were the kind of escapades she proudly told me she got up to.
(Don't worry, this phase passed...)
A point came, I think around with I was six or seven, when I realised the interrogations would keep happening, no matter how hard I tried to be perfect; I would never be perfect enough. I struggled with this for a while; I remember one time, standing there in front of her, my legs burning with exhaustion as we went round and around the same questions, increasingly lightheaded with hunger. I decided that she must be right - there must be some grain of evil lodged in my mind somewhere, making me do the wrong things sometimes, and the only thing I could think to do about it was to destroy my entire personality, burn it all out to nothing and flush out the problem and start again from a clean slate. When I was released from the questioning I went to my room and sat there, still lightheaded with hunger (I was denied dinner for my crimes) and resolved to not have my own interests and feelings any more; I would devote my life to doing the Right Thing so I wouldn't be distracted and forget things or make mistakes ever again.
It didn't work.
But she'd always taught me to question things; not directly, but by pointing out the lies behind adverts and the statements of politicians, encouraging me to think for myself and look beneath the superficial meanings of statements, and it quickly became apparent that the things she accused me of were self-contradictory. Once the shower curtain moved while I was showering because the stream of water from the shower shifted it, and some water ran out onto the cork-tiled floor; when I got out of the shower I saw this and quickly mopped it up before going to bed, but then I was yanked from my bed to be cross-examined about why I'd made the floor wet then tried to cover it up. So the next time it happened, rather than mopping it up myself, I went and told her, but I was still in trouble. I knew I couldn't avoid the shower curtain moving - the jet from the shower itself was enough to cause the curtain to move about in unpredictable ways, but however I tried to deal with the outcome was always wrong, and she claimed that this was deliberate on my part, despite the fact that I was trying as hard as I could to do the right thing. It didn't make sense.
So I realised fairly early on that the problem wasn't actually me. Which was exceedingly lucky - most people with hypercritical abusive parents end up with crushing inferiority complexes, but it started to have the opposite effect on me. The only thing in the world I could trust was myself, but I knew myself to be fallible and prone to mistakes. I had to dissect every mistake I made, trace down the thought processes that led to it in order to justify myself; but under that harsh dissection of the very core of my being, a core survived, and grew harder and stronger. I would often forget to do things, but my memory of events was clear. I could observe the world and gather facts and make deductions from them; like Descartes, I realised that all I knew for sure was that I, as a thinking observer, existed, and that any other truths I would have to attempt to infer from the unreliable and partial evidence I could gather.
I still spent time with my mother; being too quick to avoid her and go to my room whenever I could would have roused suspicion that I was "up to something" so I couldn't just hide. But I was keenly observant of my mother's emotional state, always watching her body language out of the corner of my eye to detect the early signs of irritation; if her attention were to suddenly focus on me, scanning me for signs of flaws, I would be ready with whatever lie would most reliably justify anything she could observe about me and call into question. I became accustomed to leading a double life, my inner world strictly isolated from the carefully scripted performance I put on in the world.
She had a small circle of friends, who were all people she'd known from before I was born. I'd overhear her talking to them about the old days, and I learnt a lot of, in hindsight, horrifying things for a small child to learn. One friend had a serious alcohol addiction; she tried to stop drinking once but she turned yellow so had to start again. Another had the nickname of "dizzy" because she'd had some kind of permanent brain damage due to an overdose. Another had the nickname of "push", short for "pushbike", because in her youth she'd been famous for being "the village bike", a slang term for an overly promiscuous woman.
Sometimes she would find new friends, and they'd be visiting the house for a while, and it would be great because we'd do dinner parties or have fun outings with them - but then she'd find they had betrayed her in some way and they joined the rest of the Bad People. Very few people graduated to becoming permanent friends, and when I was tracking them down to invite them to her funeral, I was surprised to find that a few of the friends I'd considered permanent had been excommunicated.
One time I remember, somebody had just recently been rejected, and my mother told me not to answer the phone that day as she was expecting them to ring us and she didn't want to talk to them. The phone rang and, instinctively, I answered it; only realising as I lifted the handset (and my mother's glare snapped around to focus on me) that I'd made a terrible mistake. But I quickly improvised a solution: pretending to be an answering machine. I calmly announced that we weren't in right now and to please leave a message after the tone, then I put my sleeve over my mouth and made a muffled beep. The newly-excommunicated friend left a message and hung up, and I received praise rather than an interrogation, due to my quick thinking and successful deception; there was no shame, after all, in lying to a bad person.
As adolescence hit, I changed; in the obvious ways, but also I gained better understanding of social relationships between people. I realised how horribly, achingly, lonely our life was. It was just me and her, but behind the fake personality I had carefully sculpted and smoothed so that trouble would slide right off, I was entirely isolated from the world; inside, it was just me in my little prison of lies. I came to envy children with families, siblings they would have feuds with. Their petty dramas about who had the most attention and whatever were so childish compare to the daily games of high-stakes diplomacy I was used to - but they were frank and honest and open in way that mystified and intrigued me, and I was jealous of the fact that they could just get away with being so transparent. I began to hate being cleverer than everyone else, because it made me lonely, and I began to see that the strength of being part of a community was far more effective than any amount of individual intelligence.
I remember how, in December, all the TV adverts would be about families in their homes, having parties and being visited by extended family, and how different my life seemed from that. I came to realise that sharing experiences with other people, sharing oneself with other people, was a magical thing and I yearned for it so keenly and painfully that sometimes I would just curl up in my bed and cry. I came to hate the way my mother saw other people as threats, how she looked so hard for betrayal that she'd always find it. I began to see the teachers I'd driven up the wall as people just trying to do their job, and realised the bullies I'd maimed were just insecure people trying to feel powerful by breaking the social contract because of other problems in their lives. I found that my acute sensitivity to my mother's body language wasn't just useful as a way to detect danger brewing, I could apply it to anybody and, combined with the results of all the introspection I had done into my own mind to try and find why I was flawed and made mistakes, let me judge people's feelings and motivations keenly.
I realised that the people my mother thought were bad were just... flawed, like everyone else, and usually in ways that hardly mattered, and were easily mitigated nonetheless. I realised that all the distant relatives I knew I had but never saw were probably not sinister evil figures after all, and I ached to meet them, to feel part of a family, to meet people I had a connection with!
But knowing this just made life harder. On top of the daily dangers, I was now saddled with a miserable yearning for how life might have been. A crucial turning point was finding my first girlfriend, when I was fifteen years old; feeling that somebody was interested in who I really was, and liked me, and wanted to spend time with me, was wonderful and unfamiliar. And painful - it felt like coming in from a freezing outdoors, extremities ice-cold and numb, and slipping into a warm bath; as sensation returns, the first thing you feel is pain, but anything's better than the numb ache of the cold. I felt like I'd repressed so much of myself in order to survive the environment at home; the effort of doing that had become such second nature, and I'd become so numb to that strain, that being able to let go of it (at least, when I was with her - I still had to come home to my mother) was a huge experience for me.
It also gave me confidence. I had long suspected that I wasn't the evil, selfish, horribly person I was repeatedly told I was - whose only positive attributes were academic success and the ability to navigate through life without ever making mistakes. As I had theorised and hoped, I was likeable, lovable even. I could make somebody feel good! I could make her smile! I could evoke desire and lust in her! Also, going around to her house meant hanging out with her family - two parents! Siblings! - and watching, even joining in with, their interactions. Getting to do normal human things like normal humans, just like I'd dreamt of while watching those TV adverts of families at Christmas. It was beautiful.
This gave me the courage to try and have a conversation with my mother about how I was struggling with how harsh her judgements of me were, and how I didn't think it was right I was so afraid of her, but that didn't end well; so I never tried that again.
But my relationship ended after nine months (and that's a whole other complicated story...), and I was back to normal life again; except now I knew what life could be like, and going back to normal was unbearable. I was desperate to find love again, because living without it was now agonising. But I was at an all-male school, and distant from my home so I didn't have many connections in my home town, and meeting potential candidates wasn't particularly practical.
Now, that's usually the origin story of an incel; a frustrated young man, angry and disappointed that he can't find love, who becomes angry and bitter with the women who withhold the emotional support he so desperately needs and feels he deserves. But my life with my mother had taught me, vividly, that love was conditional. I had no expectation that anyone owed it to me; I knew I would have to earn it, so I had no reason to blame womankind for my loneliness. I had to find ways to meet them, and make myself attractive to them, and give them what they needed so that they would give me what I needed.
One strange thing cropped up during my first relationship, though: at one point she told me about an experience where, at a party, she'd gotten hold of a bottle of wine and drank it and become quite intoxicated. She described this as a fun experience, but it horrified me - a confusing emotion I couldn't understand, that would later take me decades to pick apart. It seemed like a jumble of all negative emotions combined, and it was intense and shocking. Why did I have this? Where did it come from? Like the Thing in the Garden, this seemed to just be a phobea. I realised it had always been there, looking back at things I'd felt uneasy about in the past.
Although I can dig up no memories of any originating events for either phobea, it's usually the case that phobeas like that come from traumatic events in early life, either so early you weren't able to form episodic memories to recall directly, or so traumatic that you blanked them out. The feelings involved were very different - the thing in the garden filled me with terror as if it was an imminent threat to my life, and just made me want to flee; people being intoxicated made me feel hurt and betrayed and angry and lost (vastly more so if it was somebody I felt close to), combined with a growing cognitive dissonance about alcohol culture and the way it glorified people doing stupid thoughtless things and everyone laughing about it, while I had to be thoughtful and careful about every little thing I did, with dire consequences for failure; so they were probably different events. Well, there would have been plenty of opportunities for something to happen in the garden that terrified a young me, and my mother's oldest friends seemed well steeped in extreme drug culture so it doesn't seem too hard to imagine that I might have seen something traumatic.
So there I was; achingly lonely, with the only path out of it seeming to be finding somebody to love me, but with no real way to meet anybody outside of my all-male school friends; and with two worrying phobeas, one more easy to avoid than the other. I figured all I could do was grit my teeth and press on until I could leave home and go to University.
And two years later, I did just that.
Sadly, it wasn't as great as I'd hoped. University life wasn't easy with an extreme phobea of intoxicated people, and dating doubly so. Also I went to a university with a gender ratio of about 7 males to every 3 females (varying a bit between departments) so I was surrounded by the more traditional form of angry incels, and the women who were there were rightly prickly and defensive. I struggled, but that's a separate story, and this post is long enough already.
The important thing was that I was away from my mother, and I could set about more authentically becoming myself: the honest, warm, caring person I felt was natural to me. Oh, and I was free to buy stripey toothpaste now, and to get to know my extended family, which was a wonderful experience.
After the first term, I had to go back home over Christmas and it was horrible to need to live like that again for a while; I was relieved to get back to University. When the summer holiday came, I applied for two jobs so I could afford to stay and didn't have to go back to my hometown. which I explained by saying I needed the money to afford food and rent in my second year (which was largely true when I said it, but I ended up staying on with one of the jobs part-time when I resumed my studies so I was able to support myself anyway). I repeated this pattern as much as I could, minimising painful contact with home so I could continue to find myself. I did find relationships; I found that on the rare occasions I did meet and get talking to girls, they liked me; but they didn't tend to want the kinds of serious relationships I needed, and I found it unbearably hard if they liked alcohol, so they didn't tend to last long. But each time I grew stronger, each time I got to feel wanted and desired for a while I focussed on using that to heal my wounds; and slowly the pain of the loneliness between relationships grew less as I became more confident that I was a generally lovable person.
When I moved to other lodgings after my first year, I had a brief, delicious, moment when I was out of the old halls of residence and my mother didn't know the address or phone number of my new lodgings (remember, this was before mobile phones). For a couple of days I toyed with the thought of just... never telling her: cutting contact and fleeing. But I knew she'd track me down so eventually I rang her, was told off for leaving it so long (she'd been worried!), and remained in contact.
That was how it was for several years - making contact enough to make her feel I wasn't hiding from her, showing due care and attention to sending her mother's day and birthday presents, turning up for Christmas (and enduring being shouted at for some mistake or other whenever I did). Sometimes she asked me to come back to feed the cats over a weekend if she was away, which was no problem because I would have the house to myself.
But then even that stopped when my forgetting of her fiftieth birthday reinforced her hatred of my new wife, and that was how things were from then on.
I could leave the story there; a dark figure from my past, that I was terrified of, had died, and I was finally safe from the spectre hanging over me.
But it wasn't that that simple.
The life of my mother
My early memories were lovely. I dimly remember my father being around at the start - my main memory was of him packing his things into his car and leaving, though; an event which seemed matter-of-fact at the time, the sort of random stuff adults do; the horror of it only set in slowly, with time, as I realised my father was gone.
So it was just me and my mother. A few times we met Granny Jean, when she was in our good books, but a lot of the time we had nothing to do with he because she was one of the bad people, like my father. I was dimly aware there was other family somewhere, occasionally overhearing my mother mentioning them to others, but I'd never met them in living memory, and they were definitely bad people.
Seeing as it was the two of us versus The Bad People, we were very close. It was OK to say mean things about the bad people, fun even, and it was great to get one over on them in some way. I would love to listen to my mother tell me about the world; sometimes she would tell me about how the stars and planets formed from interstellar dust clouds, or how to care for plants and animals; sometimes she would tell me all about what was wrong with society - sexism, racism, mankind's abuse of the natural world, greed, wars. She greatly encouraged my education, teaching me to read herself before I started school and tutoring me in basic maths; and when I showed an interest in technology she bought me a teach-yourself-electronics kit with a breadboard, a bunch of 7400 logic chips, and some switches and LEDs, and we'd sit and do the exercises together. When the home computer craze hit, she got me a ZX Spectrum+ and I learnt to program it in BASIC, and I accumulated new accessories for it for many birthdays and Christmasses for years, and now I have a fine career in computing.
She didn't work; she had inherited the house so there was no mortgage to pay, we didn't have a car to fuel and maintain, we didn't eat meat and we grew our own food on a vast allotment that we spent most of the weekends tending. So our outgoings were low, and she had invested the proceeds of an inheritance, and we had maintenance payments from my father, so there was no need to work. We were hardly off-grid - running water, sewerage, electricity and gas were bought from the utilities, grudgingly (I remember her discussing techniques for interfering with the gas meter with a friend, but their magnet trick didn't work on our meter), but we were still somewhat isolated from The World with all its greed. We watched TV (albeit with a black-and-white TV licence, even when we eventually got a colour TV, because it was believed that TV detector vans couldn't tell the difference); we enjoyed a lot of shows together, like Monty Python and Doctor Who, but she hated the adverts; they showed the worst of what was wrong with society. If I ever showed enthusiasm for something from an advert, I'd be in trouble. Once when we were out shopping and picking up some toothpaste, I wanted to get the stripey kind because it looked cool; I'd seen it in TV adverts (although I knew better than to mention that), but she snapped at me that it was stupid, expensive, overpriced, and made just to take advantage of idiots who were fooled by such things.
We occupied a strange little socio-economic group, all of our own. We had less money than the working class families around us or that I met at school, but she had effectively retired in her early 20s; we had none of the financial precarity that the better-off families who relied on both parents working had. We were cash-poor but time-rich; but the other kids at school definitely had more and fancier toys than me. This was just another way I didn't quite fit in with the other kids; being different from your peers can be hard for a small child. As well as being told we were better and more clever than everyone else so being like the other kids was taboo, and being vegetarian (I particularly bitterly remember an end-of-year barbecue the school put on as a reward for the class doing well, where I sat and glumly ate an empty bun while feeling nauseous from the gross meat-cooking smells), and other things like the fact that only one of my eyes works so I lack binocular vision, I often felt a bit left out and forgotten at school. But that just made it all the more important for my mother and I to stick together.
I loved going out for walks with her and our two dogs. As well as our weekend days at the allotment, we went on all sorts of adventures. The town, having mainly grown during the Industrial Revolution, was full of lovely Victorian parks, now slightly crumbling and overgrown and mysterious; and massive old factory buildings. I remember visiting a park, which went down to the banks of the river with a series of concrete steps; we waded into the water, pondweed tickling our feet in the current, and caught sticklebacks in a tupperware box; we carefully carried them home and put them in a fish-tank and I would watch them swimming back and forth. One evening we went for a long walk, up the hill to Stockwood Park where the allotments were, but we kept going - across the vast expanse of the golf course, through the mysterious woods at the back to a dark pond with a bench beside it, but we kept going still, out of the town into the countryside; through an echoing concrete bridge under the motorway and onto a country lane amongst fields until we came to a village. We took a footpath through the graveyard and through some cornfields, warm in the late summer sun, under a great electrical pylon, and into a patch of woodland. We explored around, and found empty shotgun shells left by hunters (my mother had choice words to say about hunters), then made our way back as the sun set. I had always heard the distant sound of the motorway from my bedroom, late at night when all else was quiet; up close, under the bridge, it was a majestic roar - and on the way home, going back under the bridge in the dark, I could see the lights of the cars swooshing back and forth; and I wondered about the sorts of people who drove cars. Who were they? Where were they going? Were they really like the rich bad people on TV?
For a while, she took me and a schoolfriend to horse riding lessons; she loved horses and I found I liked them too, having social personalities like cats. When I was a little older we started travelling the world - Tunisia, Greece, various parts of Europe, then later an epic tour of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore over my thirteenth birthday; and a tour of America, Canada and Mexico when I was sixteen.
I remember a time when she was discussing, with another mother, their respective children's career aspirations. I was keen on electronics, computing, and engineering; the other parent had a daughter who had some interests or other, which they talked about a bit, the other mother said "...of course, she's a girl so she won't amount to much". I winced inside, and saw my mother's body language tense and her eyes narrow in a way that, if directed at me, would have made my blood run cold. Thankfully, she showed a bit more self restraint and tact than she would have with me, but this other mother got a very pointed and heated lecture on sexism, and ended up having to back down. It wasn't really a matter we discussed much, but I was well aware that my mother found sexism distasteful! Anybody suggesting somebody couldn't do something because of their sex would get sternly questioned: "Why? Why not?". The impression I came away with was that we were all just people, some in male bodies and some in female bodies, and that any talk of that limiting somebody's abilities was outdated bullying. This was pretty progressive for the 1980s, but I still got a "You'd better not be gay" lecture once.
Although my mother didn't work, she found grants available to pursue further education, and did so with enthusiasm. While she was learning Business Studies at the local college, I would get off the bus from school and go and wait for her in the college library, hoovering up books on electronics and computer science. She started to learn to fly, and so one day a week we'd swing by a bookshop and I'd buy a teen sci fi book, then I'd sit and read it in the waiting room of the flight school while she did her lesson. For a couple of birthdays (my eighth and ninth, I think?) I had a basic flight lesson myself, learning how to control the speed and attitude of a Cessna 152 in flight; I will always remember the first plane I flew, registration G-JONI, and whenever a Cessna flew overhead I'd look up and see if it was G-JONI, with its distinctive blue and white chequered paint job.
Through the flying she met a boyfriend, Dave, who was an engineer as well as a pilot. He hung out with the local microlight community, maintaining and flying minimalist aircraft composed of a wing, a chair, an engine, and just enough aluminium and nylon cloth to join them together. I learnt what it was like to be a person who went places in a car; he'd take us to country pub gardens in the evening and I'd have coke and crisps and explore their climbing frames or chase their ducks, and we'd fly in microlights and hang out in hangars where people had engines in bits. We went on a holiday in France together, taking Dave's grey Mercedes on the ferry, and drove all around the country visiting different towns, staying in hotels and eating exciting cheeses. He taught me Morse code and electronics and engineering and I loved it. But, like all my mother's other relationships, it didn't last; I don't know exactly what happened, but one day he became one of the bad people, and I wouldn't see him again until her funeral.
The life of an abuser
How did my mother come to be the person she was?
I can confidently say that, although my childhood was traumatic, it was a lot better than hers. The basic goal of a parent is to make sure your kids have a better childhood than you did; and in that, she certainly succeeded.
By all accounts, her father was a violent, horrible, man. He died when I was about one year old - I dimly remember his funeral, but have no memory of him, but everything I've heard from anyone who met him was that he was spiteful, and I know my grandparents had lived separately since my mother and her sister were very young (and bear in mind that the bar for parents to split was much higher in the 1950s than it is today). Her sister, who was a few years older, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, with voices that told her to hurt and kill people and animals, and my mother told me that her sister had often tried to kill her; her sister spent most of her life in and out of psychiatric care, and when she was in, she seemed to often to get into trouble for threatening other patients, from the letters I've read.
Her own words, from an email she sent me when her sister died, give a taste of what she went through:
I remember my sister being ok until I was about 3. After that she was more distant and spiteful. We were both told that until I was born her life was wonderful, then I came along and everything went wrong, so I guess she believed that. She was nearly four years older than me. It wasn't until she was a teenager that she became so violent but then my mother joined in with her so maybe they were both crazy. Anyway, I'm free now. There's nobody left who has an intent to kill me so I can relax. I'm only sorry that it left me screwed up for a while and I could have been a much better mother to you.
The details are hazy (she told fragments of stories to people, sometimes, and I overheard, but the stories were often slightly different in each telling), but I gather she was sent to a school for gifted children but she hated it and left home with minimal qualifications at around sixteen and lived on the streets, and couch surfed, for a while. I know she spent some time in Whitby, involved with criminal gangs to some extent; for the first decade or so of my life she carried a flick-knife with her, and hinted vaguely at past experience of using it in combat, so I think it's clear she lived in a constant state of fear that people were going to attempt to kill her.
After a while, she returned to her hometown, married a guy, and bought a house from her grandmother; the house I would grow up in and, eventually, inherit.
But she broke up with her husband after a year or two (I have no records as to why, and for many years lived under the impression she was still technically married, as she kept his surname for some reason), and while planning to take part in a complicated multi-month occult ritual called the Abramelin Operation, she met my father, and shortly after the end of the ritual I was conceived. That relationship lasted for four or five years until, like all her relationships, ending badly in a way that left her feeling he was a terrible person; and then it was the two of us.
I'm pretty sure she was desperate to be loved. I don't know if she had any good times as a child, but if she did, they were overshadowed by fear and violence from her sister and father, and apparently her mother too (I find that hard to believe, having known my grandmother a little, but who knows?). It was bad enough that she fled, into what sounds like some quite dangerous environments for a teenage girl to be in. Her romantic relationships always seemed to end with her feeling hurt and betrayed. I think she was overjoyed to become a mother, thinking she could create a family, unlike what she grew up with (I felt exactly the same when I had my own children); but as I grew from a baby to a toddler and started to have my own opinions and ideas, I think she began to find me threatening. The interrogations I endured as a child were her attempting to stop me from turning out like all the others. I think she felt that most people were horrible and untrustworthy, and she was afraid I would become horrible too - because then she'd lose me.
And I think it's so sad that, because of that, she ended up pushing me away; and when I went and made my own family, she decided my wife was bad and refused to be a part of our life together. If she'd let herself, she could have been surrounded by family, all loving her - because she was an incredibly amazing person, wickedly intelligent, wise, and dedicated to doing good in the world; she was never afraid to give people a piece of her mind, and her mind was keen. She'd have had a great time with us; we're that sort of family, and I can only presume that a part of that is because I learnt it from her.
Instead, she would briefly cling to people, then find a reason to doubt them, then she'd feel betrayed and hate them. And repeat the cycle.
And the thing was, I didn't harbour any grudges against her. While I lived with her, I had been furious with the injustice of her treatment of me, the pain it caused me, and the damage it did; but shortly after leaving home, with a bit of distance, I could see that she was just scared everyone would betray her, so she just lashed out at the first sign of trouble. I realised how sad this was, and how lonely she must be; but I knew I wasn't safe close to her, I was too programmed to fear her and become the person she wanted me to be when I was near her. If I was to heal, I needed distance; and she threatened to attack my wife so I needed to keep her safe; and I had no reason to trust that she wouldn't treat my children like she'd treated me so I gave them only extremely limited contact with her.
The death of my mother
From our email discussions, I had suspected that her days were numbered. She had mentioned that her mobility had reduced and she rarely left the house, and complained of low energy. I suggested she moved to Gloucester so we could visit her and take her out on trips, but she claimed it was just a passing problem she'd soon overcome and everything would be fine - I don't think she'd have been able to bear being helped, and feeling she depended on people. I knew this was a very bad sign.
For the first time today
I feel it's really overYou were my everyday excuse
For playing deaf dumb and blindWho'd have ever thought
This was how it would end for you and meTo carry my own millstone
Out of the trees
And I have to admit
I don't like it a bit
Being left here beside this lonesome road.
Lonesome road
Lonesome road
And so, I returned to the town I grew up in. I entered the house I grew up in, for the first time in decades. I saw how she had lived, only downstairs, as her mobility faded and she couldn't make it up the stairs any more; sleeping in a reclining chair in the living room while everything upstairs gathered dust. I saw the pile of grubby blankets on the floor where her body had lain for unknown days until she was found.
I went to the places I knew she kept her flick-knives, found them, and surrendered them to the police so I wouldn't have to be responsible for them (they're illegal here). I went into the once-forbidden places I knew she kept important papers, and found her divorce papers (a relief, as unless we found them or a will declaring otherwise, then her husband from the 1970s would inherit everything), then found her will (which left basically everything to me); and I found caches of photos and old letters and papers that gave substance to the things from her past I'd only heard rumours of. In time, I would gather them and start building an actual timeline of her life.
I also found out about an entire extra aunt I'd never heard of, the child of my grandfather's previous marriage (the mother having died); she died in the 1990s, with her husband already dead and childless, so my mother inherited her savings and some family photos. Investigating more about HER life is still on my TODO list!
But the thing that struck me, walking through the town we'd once explored together and going through the house and into forbidden places, was how strange it felt to be there without fear. For the first time since I was barely a toddler, I was here without being afraid. Suddenly I was the master of this home. I felt free.
Relief, and freedom. Were these normal things to feel at the death of my mother, who had raised me for eighteen years, and worked hard to give me the best childhood she knew how to? It worried me that I didn't feel sad.
The first time I cried was, when going through old memories and researching things, I found that G-JONI, the plane we used to fly in together, had been destroyed in a crash in Hungary in 2016 (under the new registration HA-VOK). In the incident report I saw the photos of its wreckage crumpled and strewn around a forest and I was struck by how upset that young me, so desperate to love and be loved that he invested his love in inanimate objects such as his favourite aircraft, would be to see it torn to pieces like that. I cried my heart out, and after, I reflected that I'd been more upset about the wreckage of an aircraft than the death of my mother.
But it was a start. I had found the key to unlocking that pain - I imagined that young me, who had sat on the living room floor to build Lego sets, and how he would feel to know his mother would lie dead on that floor, undiscovered for days. I found I had buried the feelings of love for my mother I'd had, because I learnt to fear her, and that had dominated our relationship; and I went back through memories I had and remembered how much I'd loved her before I feared her, and then the grief and tears came. I remembered how, each spring when the daisies started to spring up in the parks, I'd gleefully pick the best daisy and gift it to her and she'd press it in her wallet and keep it until the next year; so on a visit to secure the house and look for other papers, during which I took the opportunity to show my youngest daughter all the parks I'd played in as a kid (at her request), I picked the best daisy I could and carefully kept it; then when she was buried I asked the funeral director to place an envelope in the coffin with her, containing a letter and the daisy. The letter read:
Dear Karin,
I love you, and I will miss you.
I wish I'd known you better. Looking through your old letters and photos now, I am starting to learn more about you - it's confirmed things I suspected or heard fragments of, and I've learnt new things I never imagined. Your childhood must have been so painful, and I think you were betrayed by people who should have protected you and loved you. I think you were so lonely, but also so scared of trusting anyone and letting them be close to you.
It's tragic that it was just the two of us most of the time, and you were too scared to trust even me; terrified that I would turn against you like everyone else had seemed to, and so looking so hard for that betrayal that you would always find it somehow or other.
I went off to make my own family, and you could have been part of that if you'd been able to let yourself. I learnt to trust, and I'm sorry I never worked out how to teach it to you. I kept my children away from you to keep them safe, until Jean was old enough to learn how to be careful with her words around you, as I did; I wish you had lived long enough for that to happen with Mary, too. I wish the children could have sat on your knee and had you read to them, as you did with me; gone on walks at night and explored the mystery of everything; nagged you to tell the story of how the Big Bang started the universe, and stars formed, and planets, and life came from the seas - again and again!
But I kept in touch, and we always loved you, and always wished you were there; all the love you could have wanted was here, for the taking. I wish I could have shown you that people, although always flawed, will always look out for the ones they love.
I passed on your questioning mind to your grandchildren, and your fierce determination to do the right thing and fight against authoritarianism and injustice. Apart from life, those are the greatest gifts you gave me, and I'm proud to continue your legacy in my children.
I enclose a daisy, picked from Stockwood Park, for you to keep, as I used to when I was little.
Thank you,
Love from Alaric
And so, we buried her. All she had gone through, and all we had gone through together, ended with a box being lowered into a muddy hole.
I spent the days before, and the ceremony itself, mainly terrified I would somehow mess it up - forgetting to invite somebody, or misreading the email chain with the funeral director and inviting everybody on the wrong day, or something like that. When I was offered the chance to help carry the coffin - which I hadn't expected, so was caught off guard - I declined because my first thought was that I'd drop it or fall in the hole (to be fair, there was some precedent, that same hole having nearly claimed me when I was a toddler - but that's another story). But it all went OK and the worry slowly gave way to relief as everything progressed.
And on the way back to our hotel, we passed the park that went down to the river; and I looked down at the place where we had once caught sticklebacks in a box, while the dogs splashed in the cool water; and later that evening I curled up in Sarah's arms, and cried, and grieved.
Alaric, Relatives, The Family | alaric | 
Tue 18th Aug 2026 7:33 pm
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