Reflections

The mind wanders. I think back to my big childhood, attempt at running away from home. I hadn’t gone more than a few miles before I was spotted by a neighbour from our estate who ordered me into his old, blue, Austin Allegro and took me back to my parents. I remember standing in the doorway on that cold, damp evening as he explained where he had found me, hitchhiking in the dark, on the main road to the next village down the valley. I got sent upstairs and listened to the hum of their voices as I lay in bed. 

My folks came upstairs to talk to me. They sat on my bed for a while, tearful and apologetic. All of us promising to be better, and none of us exactly sure what it was we were apologising for. I expected a belting so was happy to escape punishment. It is only now, as an adult, that I understand what they went through that evening when I didn’t come home. From here, it is obvious that we were using words, but weren’t really having a conversation. It might have been English, but we weren’t all speaking the same language. I couldn’t explain why I was so upset. I was just a small child with neither the vocabulary nor the awareness to tell them how difficult my juvenile existence seemed to me. 

My parents spent their lives surviving challenges and catastrophes. In the absence of help or guidance, they had muddled through life and parenthood as best they could. Despite the years of muddling through, though, they still couldn’t explain how they had managed it, or why they had bothered. That evening, I couldn’t in any way, appreciate what they had achieved, nor did I understand that muddling through was the only tool they had at their disposal. 

I grew to respect their use of this tool later in life when it was my turn to develop resilience, grow a protective shell and muddle through for myself. That though, only happened later, much later, when my domestic situation became a mashup of tragedy and farce. I had to bend with the wind when crisis followed calamity and I learned to juggle time, family, and work. I became stronger and learned to stay in front of the slow, mudslide of life that never stopped oozing toward me. Stepping up and managing to keep ahead of the mud became my single greatest achievement. I got dirtier year by year, but never quite buried.

I wish I had understood this earlier. I wish I had taken the time, at some time, any time, to thank my folks for their efforts and to tell them that I appreciated and loved them. Too late now. They’re long gone, and the chance went with them. If wishes were fishes, and all that, I suppose.

The granite under me cools as the day becomes a memory. The light wind now carries a bit of a chill with it. I shuffle my bum, zip up the jacket and take a slow sip from the hipflask. Glenkinchie ten-year-old. Distilled close to here. Light, pleasant, and fragrant. More of a breakfast whisky really than something for an important occasion, but it was all I had in the house except an old bottle of Malibu, and that would never have done. The sun is completely gone now, and a few early stars show themselves in the moonless sky. From my vantage point, I see headlights twisting along the coast road. At one point, a train rumbles on the tracks behind me. I don’t even bother turning to see. It’ll look like a train. How much more do I need to know? 

I take another sip and consider my own crack at parenting. Jesus, my folks must have laughed to themselves when I told them the news. I, predictably enough, set out to not be my parents. That's always what people do. Except for Oscar winners, and other weirdos, who have the most marvellous upbringings, and owe everything to their wonderful Mom and Dad. Actors stand up on stage gushing about the support they got from their wonderfully gifted, caring parents. And God, of course, mustn’t forget the Big Man, taking time out from running the universe to make sure that Ben and Tabitha get the breaks with the academy come Oscar time, or indeed all the time. Most of us, though, don’t make it onto that stage, and we can be left with the impression that if our parents were more like Clint Eastwood’s, then we wouldn’t be among the perpetual strugglers, the perpetual losers, in the game of life. 

It’s not true, though. Most parents, indeed, most people are okay. They help, support, and do what they can, but not everyone can make it to the summit of everything. There will always be a mass of ordinary Joes making up the numbers, and there is nothing wrong with that. What we all find out eventually is that ‘not being your parents’ isn’t much of a strategy for life, or parenthood, or any damn thing. Not being your parents, just means that you spend most of your time floundering down different dead-ends to the ones they floundered down. You make different but similar mistakes to the ones that they made, until, after a while, you realise that you have ended up equally stuck, in an equally dispiriting, but slightly different dead-end to theirs. Your nowhere is every bit as crappy as their, previously discovered, but slightly different, nowhere.

I once had a wife and two young sons. Then, I just had the two young sons because, when they were two and three, their mother took off with a guy from her work and the only time I heard from her after that was through her solicitor. We married when we were both in our teens. We married because she got pregnant. She got pregnant because we were young and stupid and embarrassed about contraception. We didn’t think a life-changing, unexpected pregnancy, could happen to us. Until it did. My parents were surprised. Hers were furious. After a big shouting match, when her folks tried to get her to have an abortion, her dad broke my nose and scarred my face when he hit me with a well-aimed, Guinness bottle. He probably only agreed to pay for a wedding as I hadn’t gone to the police about the assault that landed me in the local emergency room for a few snotty, bloodstained, hours. 

Married bliss didn’t last long. We had a second son a year after the first, but that was the high point of our relationship. I was awkward and quiet. She was outgoing and cosmopolitan. We tried to balance her desire for parties and socialising with my desire to sit in with a book, but we were always an unlikely pairing. Barring the outcome of her first encounter with my overly enthusiastic sperm, we would surely, have split up soon enough anyway. Being forced together by circumstances just highlighted how different we really were. When she went on a business trip to Madrid with a colleague and never came back, I couldn’t say that I was all that surprised. 

Failing as a husband made me more determined to succeed as a father, and so I tried to make sure that the boys had all the toys, holidays, and cool stuff, that the better-off kids had. There was plenty of overtime at work, my parents helped with the babysitting and soon I found myself muddling through, just as my parents had done. 

For a while, it seemed to work out okay. The boys grew and changed schools. We banged heads a few times, but it all seemed normal enough. They had their mates, and then they had girlfriends. As they grew, they got into the occasional scrape with authority, but nothing serious happened. Both boys had obviously looked at my situation and invested in condoms prior to any potential intimacy. A couple of years apart, they went to university, and I found myself home alone for the first time in years. Which was when I realised that I had no life. There were no hobbies to occupy me, no friends to meet for a few pints on a Saturday night, and no romantic partners. I had nothing at all, in fact, to fill the time that I wasn’t spending at work. The boys called regularly and came back home during the holidays, but over the years, calls and visits got less frequent. When they were around, we didn’t have a lot to talk about anymore, and it seemed like I hadn’t spent much time with them since they were in primary school. Their interests and music were a closed book to me. We struggled our way through awkward, set-piece occasions, like Christmas, where everyone acted a part, and then went their ways again. Probably felt relieved as the front door closed behind them. 

Once again, despite my best efforts, it seemed like I had reached a point where parent and child were both speaking a different language, even though it was the same language. For all the effort I had put into trying to ‘not be my parents,’ all I had achieved, was to become exactly what I had run from. I struggled to tell them how proud I was of everything they had achieved. I couldn’t find the words to say how much I loved them. The worst thing, though, was the feeling, that I was unable to teach my sons how to better understand or explain themselves. Did they have a better grasp of their feelings and motivations than I had at their age? Were they doomed to repeat the cycle once again? Was this a real-life ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’? I won’t ever know. I didn’t know how to bring up the subject, never knew what it was I genuinely wanted to ask. Maybe they wouldn’t have understood the question anyway. 

I take another sip, then drain the flask. The dark sky shines now with the flame of a million stars, and the cooling wind has become more than a match for my thin jacket. I shiver in the dark and place the hipflask back into my pocket. It really is a wonderful viewpoint. The Firth of Forth spreads away from me and disappears into darkness, broken by the lights of an occasional ship. The glow of Edinburgh tints the few clouds that dot the sky, and the moon begins to rise into the sky. This evening couldn’t be more wondrous, more uplifting. I sit and witness this perfect night from this perfect outlook. Despite the cold and the numbness in my backside I gaze out into the beauty of the world, and feel, for the first time in years, at peace. 

Time to go. 

Wriggling slowly toward the edge, I draw up my dangling feet, lean forward, and, with just a small gasp, tumble toward the glittering water.