‘You were a mistake. You were never supposed to be born.’

These were the inspiring words of my father upon my reaching the lofty heights of my mid-teens. The words, though unintentionally cruel (you would have to know my father and his own unique branch of sarcasm to really understand), they represented both the culmination and inevitable birthing of a sad narrative that had passed through not only my life, but my family’s lives for more than a generation: The sad narrative of rejection.

For many years I used to believe that I was born in the wrong world, playing with this rather desperate fantasy that one day I would discover my family was not my family, and another more fitting family would one day come and intervene, and rescue me. It weakened me to the point of utter dependency on the acceptance of others. I, as a child and up until my early teens, was a very independent young man. For so long I came to believe that I was somehow not supposed to be here, like a disease or a virus uncured. I came to feel that I wasn’t welcome here, in this world, no one wanted me here, I did not belong. Finding my fit, my place in this world, felt like an impossible task. I was lonely, even if I didn’t know at the time what that implied. The friends that came my way certainly made me feel that way, family too, sadly. For many years I felt that this world was a cold, unwelcoming place, one that did not want me. I sort of saw the world as this giant, misty maze, which I, alone, did not know how to negotiate. Everyone else, I felt, got it and knew their way. I had no doubt in my heart there was this ‘somewhere’ where I belonged, but I assumed I would never find my way.

As a boy, I am sad to report, as I mentioned above, that even my own father did not want me. He liked to pretend that I was not there, or I was this unwanted ward that he was forced to raise but would have preferred things to be different. I was a mistake, after all. He didn’t hold that back from me. As I got older, it certainly pushed me nearer towards that distant, cold land called Depression. He was honest. I’ll give him that. According to him, I was never supposed to be born. My parents at the time had not long produced my sister, and they wanted to wait a few more years yet, and without intentional planning on their behalf, they learnt they were going to get a son far sooner than they intended. My father was never really warm to me when I was a child. I didn’t realise this as a child. I loved my dad. He was my hero, as most fathers are to their sons. But in our happy home, there was only one child, and that was my sister. At least, that was how my father saw it. My sister could do no wrong. She was daddy’s little girl. I was merely that other child. As a boy, I started asking existential questions that no boy at that age should I ask. I was shy, withdrawn, socially isolated, and strange.

For a while, it may have been easy to be angry at my father for both his love for my sister, and his equal apathy for his son. And I was angry, I was. But more than that, I was disappointed. All sense of worth and value were sucked out of me, and the happy, independent child was left an empty shell. I was robbed of everything, and the world became an empty place to me. But as I began to pry, there was a reason my father was the way he was.

His story begins in 1940, when he was born. His father, as so many men at the time were, was busy fighting the Nazis and defending our freedom. So it fell to my grandmother, at the tender age of 20 / 21 to attempt to raise her only son alone. I have always tried to understand her, to speculate why she did the things she did. Even though he was still only a baby, my grandmother took my father’s leg, slammed it in a drawer, breaking his leg. I could say that’s the end of the story, but it’s not. She took him to a nearby hospital, and though promising in earnest to return, that was the last my father ever saw of her. She left him and got on with her life. My father was left in the care of an orphanage in West London. He had to make his own way in life, and if nothing else, my father is a survivor. But the rejection of his mother wounded him. It wounded him as a man, and as a father. He forsook so many opportunities in life, I believe, because of the lasting effect of what his own mother did to him. I don’t want to get too personal, but it negatively shaped every relationship my father had, including the one he had with me. I remember many years later watching the third Austin Powers movie. There is a story here, bear with me. I remember the relationship between Austin and his father, Nigel Powers (played by Michael Caine). The relationship was almost identical to ours. My dad, even when our relationship improved, unfortunately entirely by my own efforts, my dad was always more of a friend than an obvious father. I have memories of me essentially raising myself. So I entered adulthood, completely oblivious about what it meant to be a man. For years, to even be referred to as a man made me feel terribly uncomfortable.

TO BE CONTINUED…