IT IS OK TO SAY, yeah, that’s enough, I don’t need more days/weeks/years like that, that isn’t for me.
Seeing so many (lovely, often wonderful) posts celebrating a core, key relationship that isn’t reflected in your experience can stir a whole mess of emotions and reactions, guilt a primary one. And we are so buffeted by guilt, for thoughts just as much as action.
But to some of those people being buffeted I want to say, you don’t have to feel responsible when somebody else shits in their own nest, even if you used to share it. You can leave that nest to them. Find your own, build your own, share your own nest instead.
Yeah, Father’s Day did bring some thoughts.
What does it mean to say you owe someone and should not pull away? A parent for example. Is putting limits on it unreasonable and unfair? They brought you here, in most cases they raised you and gave you a chance to live and grow up in some comfort, not ever having to think about necessities except in the abstract; not ever having to think about the future except in terms of what can you make of it, rather than is there one available.
There is and should be gratitude for that. None of that was easy, not least for those from migrant families who did all this in a place that thought all of them at very least a bit odd, the “other”. Some of us dread the idea of moving a few suburbs away, yet here was a generation that traded-in everything known and comfortable for somewhere with potential, and no more than potential. Certainty? Forget about it.
On top of that of course is the societal expectation of gratitude, a double layer of pressure that plays out publicly as well as privately. A combination which makes for a burden, sure, but in truth not an unreasonable one. Recognition and respect for that done for us is a decent place to start, and decency is no small matter in a time when you can struggle to find it in public institutions or public life. Even if you never particularly liked them, you can recognise there was good done.
But where does it stop?
Those who have lost your respect, whose treatment of others – people close to them, people close to you, people in general – goes against your principles, your minimum standards of behaviour, do they get to trade on that gratitude endlessly? Can you forgive someone who made the life of a person you love a misery, or if not forgive at least not let it dominate relationships, because “you should”?
Is racism or sexism or sectarianism or simple crassism to be tolerated because it is exhibited by someone who did right by you before? Even after you have accepted that the past can’t be fixed, that indeed you have no interest in it because of this, do you let that behaviour repeated in the present slide by on the thought that that is just who someone is? Do you let the self-inflected loneliness you can see, the sadness you can imagine – all of which, when added to a sense of entitlement, fuels bitterness – become a case for stepping down from your own high horse?
Maybe when you can look around and see that you have all the relationships in depth and variety that this person does not. When you can see that on those occasions you have mimicked some of their mistakes, you have tried to remedy them or made efforts to avoid them repeating. When your relationships with those who came through the same situation are stronger and deeper now than ever. When happiness, not bitterness, defines your life.
Then it’s okay to say I don’t have to feel guilty. This is a better way to be.
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