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?