“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski
I wanted to write a blog post about addiction but given my last few posts, I think I’ll switch it up a little bit. I’ve always had a strange relationship with my parents while they were alive. I find it interesting because hearing other people’s thoughts about parents showed that everyone had differing relationships as well. Hopefully, writing about them will give me a release and finally have something to look at later and say “Oh yeah, they were arseholes”.
So I was brought up here, there, and everywhere. We moved around a lot till 1990 when we settled in North Wales. I was 8 at the time so I remember this location better than the others. The others were just a blur really. I do remember the playroom of the house in Peterborough being haunted though. My mum said there was a little girl there who liked to play with the toys when me and my brother (dickhead herein). Dickhead never mentioned seeing her, but I would. And it freaked me out. But that’s a topic for another conversation. Back to my parents. My mum was Dutch and my dad was Scottish. This made for an interesting dynamic in the house. My mum was very liberal with things. An example of this is one day in high school, I would regularly skip school. I’d sneak out the front gate and walk along the beach and into town. I would buy cigarettes as I looked older and then sell them to the kids in school. So anyway one day I decided to go and get a haircut. Did that and then came back to school and slipped into the lesson. I think it was Welsh. Mrs Evans pulled me out of the class and questioned the haircut. I did explain that maybe she was getting old because how could I get a haircut if I was in school all day. She wouldn’t drop it. So I got sent to the head of year, and they asked, I said I had a doctor’s appointment and decided to smarten myself up on the way back to school. He then phones home. My mum answered, “Did your son have a GP appointment today”, “Yes”, “Oh erm okay sorry to have bothered you”. Sent back to class. I spoke to Mum after school and she never mentioned it. It must have happened a few times and she always had my back. I’ll never forget in primary school how my dad told the teacher off about Welsh. “It’s not a real language, no one uses it and I won’t have my son learn it”. Not embarrassing at all. Then there was the time mum bought me and dickhead fireworks. For fun. I was 10. SO naturally we started lighting them and throwing them on the street. The police officer comes running telling us it’s illegal etc. Mum pretends she can’t speak English and speaks Dutch to the police officer. We run out of fireworks. The police said not to do it again. Madness.
See I have a conflict because of all the fun we had as kids having crazy parents it did ruin things a bit. You wanted to have a stable household or be told off once in a while about something that all other kids would be told off for. Let’s see. Drinking was acceptable at age 12+, and smoking weed was fine so long as you didn’t stink the farmhouse out, hell, you could grow it like dickhead did. So long as Dad didnt find out about the grow then all was good. Smoking 14+. Never an issue given they both had 40-a-day addiction. Forced labor aged 12 (with a work permit) at the factory packing bottles for £3hr. So technically not forced labor as we were paid but EVERY half term, summer vacation we were worked. Hard work. Very manual work. They did instill a work ethic in us. It motivated me to get away from Wales ultimately. It took one worker saying “You’ll just end up here like everyone else”. Sod that I thought. High School -> College and then Uni. I did work there during the holidays to generate extra cash for uni.’
My mum would drink every day. She would dilute the wine with water but then drink twice as much. She would pop pills like candy and give me valium from age 10 when I couldn’t sleep or if I was moaning about something. Sore body part? codeine. There was a pill for everything. I was raised thinking it was totally acceptable to take copious amounts of meds and to “help myself if I need it” attitude has caused lasting damage. The same with drinking. Because wine isn’t drinking. It’s just wine. Aged 12 and drinking almost every day. Really set me up for when the sexual abuse started.
And now I’ve lost the point and plot of this post. Both parents are dead. My mum died in 2014 due to lung cancer and my dad died in 2018 due to dementia. After my mum died I got into her email account to check for bills. She manipulated the f8ck out of everyone, playing them off and generally lying about things that happened. I read some heartbreaking emails. “I wish he would kill himself so the suffering stops”. Things like that. My dad’s dementia was intense. I tried to be there as much as I could, through all the disbelief and paranoia that he had from it. Having to constantly explain that mum died as he’d forget. When he was in the hospital I would be weak and give in a few times “Mum is on her way from the farm now”. He would smile and fall asleep. I was holding he is hand when he died. I felt him squeeze and shuffle backward in his hospital bed. “Do what you need to do Dad”. Then he died. It still upsets me to this day. I can deal with accusations, paranoia, and things but that was the first time someone died in front of me. I phoned dickhead to come to meet me at the hospital. I cried in the stairway for 10 minutes straight before he pinged me that he was there. I cried not because I miss him but because of all the shit he caused in the four years after Mum died. I did pretty much everything for him for 4 years. Being called a thief when he couldn’t find his wallet, or that I was giving him the wrong pills, that he never washed for over a year and would just soil his nappies instead of getting up and walking to the toilet.
I could go on forever. If I was to be asked if I miss them? sadly my answer would be no. Not really. I used to miss phone calls with my mum but that stopped after seeing the emails. As for Dad, well, whatever happens to you when you die will hopefully be better than living in your own filth. Parents are great because they teach us a lesson. The lesson of what not to teach your own kids.
