The story of my life

Given my own social difficulties, and those of my aspie son, Jonah, it’s hardly surprising that my forefathers have been touched with the aspie stick. And when you have a lot of uncompromising, socially awkward people in one family, it’s bound to cause problems.

My mum Kathryn, a Canadian left handed tech whizz who has more software than I have outfits married my dad George, also a leftie – in brain hemisphere, if not in politics – an inventor of high end audio, some time back in the misty golden age of 70s Britain.

This was a time when marriage was still deemed appropriate after half a shandy and an awkward half hour left alone together in your parents’ living room – and my forbears sure married quick. My Dad was young; my mum, eight years his senior, a worldly Smith College graduate (like my beloved Sylvia Plath). Kat was something of fox with a chequered past and an American accent (Brits can’t tell the difference) – she’d been married before, to a ‘mad Hungarian’; George, with rather more hair and less of a paunch back then was a bright spark, with some good ideas and a chip on his shoulder left over from the divisive Chatham education that had failed him because he was a poor speller. He never got over not being let into science club.

In their wedding picture, she has flowers in her hair, romantically blow dried in the latest, pre-Diana, Farrah Fawcett flicks; he in a grey flared suit, looked pleased as punch, while his family, my working class grandparents, his chubby sister, now an obese senior call centre operative and bus driver older brother, still a bus driver, look on, bamboozled. A shotgun wedding it may have been, but my ma wasn’t preggo. Katie came along a year or so later; I followed swiftly… too swiftly, a mere 12 months after that. My dad was 24, and had lost his job with aviation and weapons firm Marconi, because he struggled with his managers. My mother was a electronics industry PR exec in London, and as the major wage earner, my sister and I were at day care in six weeks post-partum, while my mother joined the trickle, later flood of power-suited, shoulder-padded women blazing a trail into the 80s workforce. In the Medway backwater where we grew up, being a working mum, particularly with babies, was still relatively unusual. As was their divorce two years later. She’d been having an affair, or so the story goes, with his boss.

It’s a story which has coloured my whole life. My father shut down a bit after this, although he fought to keep us tooth and nail, and he managed it, itself a miracle in the maternalistic 80s. My mother left, never to return, but given my father’s black and white outlook, he never would have had her back in any case. She said he had hit her, and broke her nose, but who knows. I wonder whether she didn’t say the same thing about the mad Hungarian, but a lot of it has been muddied in the lapping waves of times.

George, still a young man, got on with it, met my step mum, Jane, a nursery teacher who adored and endured him, despite the fact he never married her, though less so us as time went on and we became gawky, gangly argumentative teens. He built his business – an empire that now keeps him in the high tech hi-fi shows of Asia most of the year, where he met his current wife, Ting tong, and with whom he has a daughter, Jess, 3 days older than Jonah, as well as her two kids (now 17 and 20) from her previous marriage with whom she arrived in England after (another) shotgun wedding to my dad in Korea when I was still at Uni.

My dad bought my stepmother Jane a house for her troubles, currently depreciating in a slow suburban housing market.

We have a difficult relationship, my dad and I, and we don’t speak often. When we do, it’s formal, drenched in wrongs and soaked in bitterness. But we’re both mellowing of late. He is getting older, and I’m all too aware of being left with the guilt.

I resemble my mother, although my personality is pure George: driven, soppy, bloody-minded, perfectionist. For those reasons, we clash.

After a lifetime of protecting us, It’s hardly surprising George didn’t know when to stop, but as teenagers Katie and I were chomping at the bit of his materialistic parenting style, which lavished a solid 80s mansion round us, and kept us trapped within its yellow bricked walls and pillared front door; where Jane, a nervous wreck at keeping my increasingly difficult dad happy, argued violently with my troubled teenage sister.

Our monthly trips to Kathryn’s wild, tumbledown Berkshire Victorian school house were fraught with tension too. My step dad, a verbose, charismatic, violent drunk was scathing of my father; found us an inconvenience, but for those reasons, he and Kat gave us a degree of freedom to keep us from being under their feet, which unlike the cloying protectionism of my father’s pot-pourried walls was a literal breath of fresh air.

One day, aged 15 and fed up with being a schoolroom swot with few friends, I jumped, literally out of a window to escape into the night to meet a boy who I’d met at my mum’s house. For my father, this act of disloyalty was the straw that broke the back of our relationship, and I was banished to my mothers’, three hours away up the M4, where I barely spoke to him, until I took an overdose after my stepfather had beaten me up in my sleep. My mother, with a slipped disk, and a fear of confrontation, was useless; my dad resolute that I should not go back. Shortly afterwards, My step-father had a stoke . His business had failed.

At that point I checked out a bit mentally too. Became a stripper to fund an ill planned trip around the world, and later, my studies – I’d always found solace in good grades despite my personal upheavals. My dad, who resented the education system, refused to fund me through my redbrick institution.

But he came to my graduation. I’d got a first in English, an achievement I’ve not yet bettered, professionally. It was a joke really, my mum and dad having dinner for the first time since I was barely a toddler. My mum, after too much wine, getting a little flirty while my blood boiled at the events that had led me to this scenario of ridiculous inevitability.

It is a series of 80s clichés, but its also a personal tragedy, and one that continues to shape my own parenting, and relationships – I try and often fail to make a better fist of it despite myself. But It’s all too easy to apportion blame and allow bitterness to gather like a lichened stone, but it is this very trait that only brings forward this heartbreak another generation.

My dad came to visit yesterday with his wife and children, after a hiatus of several years and much angry texting. He looked more or less the same; she expensively dressed, beautiful face rigid and largely unsmiling, an impassive recipient of coffee and champagne while a swirl of chaos panted round her designer shod feet; my younger sister – now nearly eight, a prettier, Asiatic version of myself, with less of the Bambi-limbed awkwardness I exhibited as a child, whirling around the three floors of our townhouse getting on like the proverbial with her nephew, my son. My step-siblings now towering above me, friendly, yet distant, the anecdotes of their lives in my old house echoing my own childhood, but this time, with no expenses spared – and my father no longer the head of the house, but in thrall to the lady of the house.

They ate and drank while I rushed round cleaning things as kids and dogs created a gentle stream of chaos. A wander into the the parkland at the back of the house brought relief. The pond out back brought on the revelation that they had had a pond installed in the old garden back in my childhood home. A picture revealed a summerhouse overlooking a veritable lake. I said I was glad I didn’t have the upkeep; that the astroturf in my backyard was easy to maintain, and soon, the kids would be able to go off and explore by themselves, without me having to supervise their every move.

“You’ve done well”, Dad texted after the event, having remained quiet throughout the meal that Tom had whipped up in a Saturday morning frenzy of baking, icing and slow cooking; the dog a convenient icebreaker that allowed us to ignore the years that had slipped beneath the bridge. “You’ve got a good husband and your children are turning out so well. Your new home is so lovely and it is a great area but the play area is so close and there might be a temptation later on, to let them go, when they are older, on there (sic) own to the park. It should be resisted strongly.”

I may make many mistakes as a parent, but using my children as collateral, extensions of my own personal style ethos or treating them as possessions to be controlled are mistakes that I won’t be handing down the generations. So yes Dad, I will be letting my children go to the park on their own, as soon as they feel they are ready. I’d rather they fell in the pond or got approached by strangers than let their limbs and souls wither from the safety of the sofa.

But though I rankled at what I saw, given our fractured history, as the patronising, passive aggressive undertones of this message, I appreciated the sentiment, all the same. It was well meant, as I think, when all is said and done, is all any of us are.

The distinct inability to empathise running through the veins of my family history has wrought enough damage. But we are all of us victims of ourselves and the age in which we live, and viewed through the sepia toned filter of hindsight, it’s good to try and understand this story in a wider context than the personal tragedy that has taken on a life of its own in my brain, with the passing of the years.