Patrimony

Having ruminated on the loss of contact with my children yesterday I went on today to think about my own chaotic childhood. Through various periods with counsellors and therapists and simply through self-reflection I have come to understand how my own childhood challenges and problematic experiences of parenting, especially from my father, have made it hard for me to maintain relationships. Of course, the failure to hold my marriage together eventually led to the loss of contact with my children.

More than ever recently I have come to appreciate how my early experiences of parental discord and my father’s violence, problematised my relationship to my own masculine self and indeed, probably to all men to some degree. My earliest memories include cowering and hiding from turbulent exchanges of shouting and screaming; of witnessing horrific and disturbing violence.

A particularly powerful memory is from the age of six or seven standing hand-in hand with my two years senior sister, clutching my teddy close to me as we both cried and sobbed, begging daddy to stop as we watched him once more violently assault my mother, this time in the bathroom. And while this was not the first time that I’d witnessed his violence, it was the first and only time I’ve ever seen my father cry. With my mother lying bruised, battered and weeping fully clothed in the empty bath, my father dropped to his knees and smashed his head against the ceramic sink breaking off the corner where his head had struck it then wept himself as well. I can’t know but I felt that his tears were more from shame than physical pain.

I grew up feeling that I wanted at all costs to avoid becoming my father, to avoid being like him. Not surprising perhaps because of those sorts of experiences and another abiding memory of being physically kicked out of the front door and down the steps at age 11 by mother screaming at me “You’re just like your father!” following a shouted row between us. I now have an internalised, visceral abhorrence of bullying, aggression and violence, which when combined with my own sometime dysregulated emotions and a temper that needs tempering is problematic whether the cause is childhood trauma, ADHD or inherited traits it is hard to know.

I’d like to think such exposure to violence is not the normal experience and less so than it used to be forty-odd years ago, but I have always found it disturbing the way that so many of our cultural models valorise male violence and aggression. Whether it is sport, action, war, and gangster films, video games, or longer standing mythologies and legend we seem to live with contradictory schizophrenic cultural psychology that on the hand celebrates male violence as the ultimate expression of masculinity, but on the other hand are surprised when our societies suffer from and are damaged by male violence. Indeed, I would argue, that considering the way so much of popular discourse glamourises male violence and detaches it from its consequences, we should rather be surprised if there was less of it.