Books

Something interesting happened yesterday. My Father paid for my university books.

Several people had donated money to a fund I'd set up, just before my second hospitalisation, to help me to pay for university supplies. I sent word of the fund out to my cousins, all of whom are on my father's side of the family, and I suspect word of this got back to my Father through one of his sisters. My Brother returned from a trip to the family home with our Father's quiet message, loaded with meaning. I took it as a given that this move had not been mentioned to the Gang.

I wish I knew how to get a message back to him. I want to thank him. Not only is it brave, but it means that he is still my ally. I wonder how much he knows of my Aunt's poison pen letters, or my Sister's text message banning me from his birthday. However, I don't want my Brother to feel like piggy-in-the-middle, much as I suspect him of reporting back to the Gang whilst he lives with Leo and I. Making him play messenger would be unfair. Contacting my Father otherwise, however, is impossible. My handwriting would be recognised in a letter, and he has no mobile phone through which to make a private call. The landline would be answered by my Mother. He would need to contact me whilst on his own, but this will not happen. Like me, he is an extreme introvert, utterly shy and permanently wearing a smile to hide his true emotions. The Gang often complain of the absence of friends in his life as something abnormal, but over the years I have come to see it as self-protection. If trust is never built, it can never be broken and used against you. Having seen how quickly my friends abandoned me for my Sister, I sympathise with him completely.

The thought of him taking the Gang's abuse with a smile and a nod, as he always has, makes me weep to think of. They cannot communicate with ones they profess to love in anything but insults, so knowing that each barb is meant sincerely must cut him each and every time. I wish he would leave. I have wished for years and years that my Parents would divorce. Yet I know that he could not live on his own, and that he would have nobody to look out for him besides family, most of whom still live in the south.

For myself, my disowning by the Gang has been the making of me. Without their voices to undermine me, I suddenly find myself returning to university. My three closest friends have tightened into a closer familial knot around me than I have ever known. The Gang may have filled the ears of everyone else around me with vitriol, yet I am stronger than ever.

But I still have an independent spirit, and I am able to mend myself and begin life anew. My Father cannot. I sense that he has been beaten down to the point where the only option left to him is to seek as quiet a life as possible. I cannot blame him. All the faults I saw in him when I was younger have come to make a tragic sort of sense. He did not support my Mother's pushiness when it came to my extracurricular activities. It would never have occurred to me to protest, so brainwashed was I, but what I was told was dereliction of fatherly duty was, in fact, a gentle protest. Perhaps he wanted me to go into computer science, having shown so much promise in programming when I was young. Truly, I wish I had taken that path now instead of the one my mother directed me down. That path has made me broken and penniless. Perhaps he knew this would happen, and had no way of stopping it.

Do they blame him for my rebellion? If so, have I made things harder for him? That thought is unbearable. He has shown me kindness, even after almost a year without contact. He alone of the Family has shown support for my new career path. The least I could do is to help him in return, but how?

A Get-Well Wish

Another letter from my aunt arrived the day I was due to leave hospital. I had been admitted with severe gastritis ten days previously, and I knew that news of my illness would have reached my family via my brother. I had asked the nurses not to admit any member of my family but my brother to the ward, because any further stress could cause disaster. So when Leo told me that an envelope with my aunt's handwriting had arrived, moments before I was discharged, I was upset.

What struck me first about this timely communication was that I had not received any congratulatory message upon my acceptance into a teacher training course at university. This happened almost a month ago, but there were no cards or letters offering congratulations then. Furthermore, my aunt had deliberately waited until I was ill and vulnerable to strike with another character assassination.

She opens with her own diagnosis of my medical problems:

My first thought is that it may possibly be your medication which is now causing problems as you seem to have been on it a long time.

My doctor prescribed me new antidepressants two months ago. That is not a long time.

My second thought is that pasta may be the culprit. ...I suggest you investigate gluten-free diets.

I asked the doctors if my diet may have had any effect on my condition; they replied that it was very unlikely. No dietitian came to see me during my hospital stay, and no advice on my diet was given by anyone.

My third thought is that the ongoing situation between you and your mother may be the cause without you consciously realising it.

When the pain in my abdomen first started, I was well aware that stress might have been a contributory factor. It began at my university interview, which was an incredibly important moment for me. Undertaking this monumental challenge without familial support is going to be incredibly stressful. However, the doctors said that the causes of gastritis are many and varied, and in my case it was "just one of those things".

It's not unusual for my family to believe that they know better than doctors, particularly when it comes to me. They are right; the experts are wrong; I should do as my family says rather than listen to trained professionals.

She continues to write about my non-communication with my mother:

I cannot understand how a person of your intelligence is unable to think rationally about the problem and conclude that there has to be give and take in all sorts of situations in life. When you are able to think about your relationship with your mother in a considered way then perhaps you will acknowledge that your mother has been the giver and you have been the taker.

Because my view of my relationship with my mother does not line up with their own, my family think I am irrational. I quite agree that my mother has been the giver - of plenty of psychological abuse. Everything she ever gave me came with conditions and caveats. She gave me hoops to jump through. She gave me guilt.

Next, she writes about my absence at Christmas:

You made the situation worse by giving [my brother] a present but nobody else. It did not go unnoticed that you were trying to make a point.

Certainly, but not the point she perhaps assumed I wanted to make. The previous Christmas, I gave my family gifts that I had spent months making by hand. I worked hard on each one and I was eager to see what everyone thought of my handiwork. Of the six relatives I gave these gifts to, four were visibly disappointed. They offered no thanks, nor appreciation of the effort I had put in. It was at that moment that I resolved not to give gifts the following Christmas. Why should I put so much effort into getting myself hurt?

 I was extremely saddened and disappointed that you did not acknowledge that presents were sent with [my brother] for you from [the family]. What does that say about you as a person?

I hope it says the following things: I will not be drawn into situations I want no part of by material things. I want no relationship with people who, regardless of the level of gratitude I show, will continue to abuse me, even when I am at my most fragile. I want no communication. I am now strong enough as an individual to make a stand and protect myself, and being apart from my family is what I want.

As an afterthought, she mentions my university place:

I hope you will see this as a chance to turn your life around and to wean yourself off your medication.

Why the obsession with my medication? Is my condition really so much of a stigma to these people?
Of course it is. Having a mentally ill niece is a source of great shame to my aunt, as must be to the rest of my family. It would never occur to them that they helped to create this situation themselves. Likewise, it would never occur to them that depression and mental illness is not something you can just get better from.

It is a pity that you did not volunteer at one of your local schools just to become more aware of the way schools are run these days. I daresay there will be great changes even from when you were a primary school pupil!

Those three weeks last summer notwithstanding, I take it. My social anxieties, my difficulties with the benefits system, and the stress my family continue to heap on me from afar are good reasons for my not volunteering any further. I have a perfectly good understanding of how education has changed since my own ended. Apparently, "someone of my intelligence" can also be hopelessly stupid and ignorant too.

There is no mention in the letter of how I was banned from my father's seventieth birthday celebrations by the family. Waiting for an admission of guilt from these people may take longer than waiting for the end of the world.

My mother has not sent a get-well-soon card, nor a congratulation card. I don't expect her to, and I don't want her to either. I want to be left alone to get on with my life, free of the control and anguish my family want to place on me. I want independence. I want freedom.