Melanie Reid lost the use of her legs in an accident. He son is leaving home. She writes: The last thing I wanted to inflict on him was the family curse of emotional blackmail. At the same stage in my life, I was offered two newspaper traineeships, one in Edinburgh, the other with a national paper in the South. Enter my parents, equivalent in age to other people’s grandparents; my father not only 90 per cent deaf since the war, but also permanently crippled by a road smash (you can see luck runs in our family). And my mother, who existed just to keep him happy. “How wonderful you have a choice. We’d prefer you to be in Scotland now we’re getting older,” he told me, in a way that removed all choice. So I stayed, but always resented it, like an ache in my bones. Remember that awful watershed where suddenly your parents go from heroes to zeroes? When they become a chore? Being dutiful and remembering they exist is the twentysomething’s burden, when all you want to do is go yahoo, enjoying your friends and your life. I still recall phoning home at weekends, hearing my mother’s vaguely rebuking, “Are you coming home next weekend? Your father would love to see you.” David Aaronovitch once wrote a gloriously honest magazine article, in which he expressed his guilty irritation with his parents for separating after he left home, because it meant he had the burden of worrying about their emotional state; plus, he had to make duplicate duty phone calls. When, really, he just didn’t want to think about them at all; he just wanted to get on with his own life. Which is why I vowed never to be a drag. After my accident, which inflicted enough emotional damage on my son as it was, I became even more determined not to shrink his horizons. Earlier this year we had one of life’s Big Conversations, in which I told him that my health was not in the equation when it came to his career. You must go away. Go south. Live. You must not be a prisoner of my injury. Spread those damn clichéd wings. Maybe, though, I should have apologised to him for the biggest cruelty of all. My generation may weep self-pityingly when our offspring leave, but we have already comprehensively failed them: we’ve created a society in which there are few jobs, fewer choices and endemic disappointment for the young. Where it’s accepted practice never to acknowledge job applications. Where the young spread their wings and soar, not realising their parents have bombed the landing strip to smithereens. Shame, isn’t it?
Posted on: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:57:53 +0000
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