With an honours degree in child and adolescent mental health my daughter works hard in several roles, continues to learn and grow and most importantly helps so many other people. Tomorrow morning she has an interview for one of the very few places in this area for a government bursaried post graduate degree in social work. She constantly finetunes her future and I am so proud of her it makes my heart want to burst.
This has triggered another thing I remember…
I believe she was doing her A levels when my father rang one day. I think I’ve mentioned in a previous post the answering machine messages. The big sigh and irritation that no one was in when it had taken two months to get around to calling in the first place. He made it sound like a duty to be endured. His ‘Interested Father’ act. I hated them because they made me feel sick.
After 3 coffees I rang him back and during the conversation I mentioned that my daughter was considering Social Work and it went something like this:
NOOOOO NOOOO NO NO NO OH NOO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.NOOOOOOOOOOO.NOOOOO
It was loud and dramatic and my stepmother joined in, in the background. They’d always been super dramatic ( my daughter and I went to my stepsister’s wedding in Florida and man that was well fucked up, not just a little but majorly fucked up, but that’s another story). Between my dad and his wife acting out Macbeth was done daily over lunch.
The thing is ‘normal’ people that just do their lives notice weird shit like this. So I remember I went cold and clammy and then I wanted to cry. I should have put the phone down but hey it was my Dad after all. Turns out one of the staff at their pub was a social worker and she’d had a breakdown. That entitled them to all this drama apparently. This total disrespect to my daughter’s possible future aspirations. Their son wanted to be an International Rescue person bless his cottons and that was fine only it wasn’t because he was shit at maths. But a social worker was scary shit.
I write now and wonder at my silence. My awe and fear of my father. That I didn’t put him straight, tell the pair of them to shut the actual fuck up and ring me when you’ve calmed down.
Another time I remember we had just got Noah so I was 51 years old. Yep 51 and I mentioned we had got him and off he went again….NOOO WHY? JUST WHY? THEY PISS AND SHIT EVERYWHERE AND YOU HAVE TO LOOK AFTER THEM!! WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS?
Like I was some little kid. I wonder now if maybe I was the only person he could talk to like this and he could get away with it? Like his oldest child was the only one he could say stuff to and wouldn’t answer back because she loved her dad?
Everytime though I used to think ”why not ring my sister? Why not give her all this weird shit?”.
Thing was he never did. So she never knew this pain.