Parental dysfunction (or What Philip Larkin Said)
1. I'm sure my dad thought I was gay, or was going to turn out gay. I didn't like football, motor racing, darts or cars ... I was bookish and drew pictures of superheroes. It was the late 70s and he came from a different age. Every evening he would walk in the door from the factory where he worked, sit down at the table where I and my sister were waiting for mum to dish up the dinner, and he'd pull out a copy of the Sun from his pocket, open it to page 3, turn the black-and-white image of the semi-naked woman towards me and pronounce, "Cor, look at them, son. Don't get many of them to the pound do ya!" or "She won't sink in the swimming baths eh!" To this day I do not know what reaction he expected. I was 7.
2. When I was about 10 my dad came down wearing a fire-engine red, wide-collared, disco-style shirt to take me to parents' evening. I begged him not to wear it but he did ... for every parents' evening until I left school ... W****r move, but I will do the same when I have kids, no doubt.
3. One day, when I was 13, they divorced. My mum had been seeing another man, someone from her work, and they moved in together. But then they argued, worse than my parents ever did. And each Wednesday and every second weekend I'd have to sit through it, a teenage witness to their relationship dysfunction. As an adult I don't know what lessons it's taught me. I've sustained a 16-year marriage in multiple countries and starting a family, but I don't attribute it to any lessons I learned in my childhood. Perhaps I'm more quick to seek resolution with my wife, reluctant to simply score points in an argument for its own sake. But if so it's a lesson I could have done without, save only to illustrate the depressing reality that we humans are capable of being messed up in myriad different ways. And any adult should know this by now. (Via b3ta.com)
