Social problems and tangled thinking make victims of us all. Part two: in particular

A mixture of society’s muddied entitlement, deep insecurity and behavioral traps is a theme that has recurred throughout the week.

A visit to a family member this weekend revealed how a situation where expectations, resentment, bitterness and depression combines to make a pig’s ear of a child’s life. A shotgun post pregnancy shotgun wedding between a banker and stripper is having, after a couple of years, predictable results. It seems a running theme in our family. After all, that is more or less Tom and my story, so who am I to judge? Except that we too, became tangled up in our own motivations and expectations. It’s taken effort on both of our parts to sort it all out. But I digress.

The father, depressed, withdrawing into work seems resigned to his fate: that of supporting a family he’s not sure, after all, he wanted; the mother, angry at the world, her child and herself is verbose, drinking heavily: both failing to recognise how their own behaviour is contributing to a situation where their child appears withdrawn and confused by the demands placed on him.

Allowed to sleep in his parent’s bed, he gets blamed for keeping them, up and waking at all hours, and when he melts down in tears, he gets blamed for his “bad behaviour”, despite the fact that he has been given two Capri sun in a row, and a diet of junk food that perhaps the parent don’t even recognise as junk, as contributory factors out of his control. The difficult family situation of the mother has made her fall for the cult of motherhood, where she kills the child with kindness and lack of discipline and often puts her own needs and wants last, so much that she then feels the need to rebel against her own restrictions and get so drunk she’s becomes a disgrace. It’s a mess, and no one can individually take the blame.

The grandparents are censorious, judgmental and exhausted from being “kind”  and “understanding” without setting their own boundaries. It’s no wonder the mother doesn’t know what to do with herself but try to rekindle her lost, rather misspent youth. I don’t blame anyone. I know how it can be, but there are ways of getting yourself out of a sticky situation and if you don’t seem to be trying them, then the world will judge.The problem is, when you’re in the woods, it’s hard to see the trees.

Or it could just be that everyone had had a hard week. Who the fuck really knows?