Parent’s Love Affair
I’ve never written r myself before without the rules of a University dictating every paragraph. I’ve read plenty and always been in awe of anyone who has successfully completed any kind of written story, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. Storytelling is as old as time, look at the Bible, the old and New Testament. Stories told by different authors, points of view, of times we would otherwise know nothing about. Stories create history, and without witness accounts of the human experience how can we build up a sense of who we are? Some stories are taller than others, some very obviously fictitious, some deliberately so, others claiming the truth, some admittedly fantasy. We have the newspaper and the media, where the news and storytelling of the events across the globe now evolve 24 hours a day, available at the touch of a screen. Once upon a time we all waited for the evening edition of the local rag, or the ten o’clock news, hungry for whatever new story was being reported.
Storytelling connects us. It creates the sense of community, shaping the experience that is to be. Sometimes it is written, sometimes sung, other times it is created with art, and other times through dance. Whatever the medium, stories are created all over the world, and create a sense of shared experience, a rich tapestry that is life, lived over generations of teachers, preachers, historians and layman. No voice is less important.
In June 2024, I finally gave strength to my voice, and began the journey of writing, shaping my own history, creating a narration that is my experience. I hope that it will inspire you, resonate with you, evoke emotion within you, and be an inspiration for positive change in your life. The work on my website is not a one-sided conversation; rather a lead speaker, my voice, opening the stage up for others to join in, to feel heard and bear witness to their own wounds and trauma. The site is dedicated to the experience of Complex-PTSD where people can send in their tales, stories and experiences. Graceewilkinson.com
According to the mating rituals of human adults, in particular the very specific blend of an Autistic male and Bipolar female, very little good can come of this union! My mother had a formal diagnosis, but my father not. That’s perhaps a little reductive. The partnership brought four miracles that are my siblings and I. Regardless of the turbulent early life, we have all entered our adult lives intact, albeit, bearing the scars of the abuse sustained over many years. I am only the voice for one of the four of course and cannot assume the pain of another. Nevertheless, without the existence of our parents, we would never have brought to life!
My parents met in the Haworth Arms, in Hull, a busy pub, popular at the time (late 60s I think!) for its live music. Anyway, I’m not sure if it was love at first sight, but the pair soon got talking and found some commonalities. Both had lost their fathers, my mother very recently, only a couple of years’ prior, my father when he was three. They were both very articulate, had a flare for languages, music, and a love of the arts, including music.
The dating world back then was very different of course, a far cry from the Tinder culture of “swipe and go”. They would go onto court before my mother fell pregnant with her first child, my oldest sister. Soon after, they were wed, shot gun style. It was deemed that if not done swiftly, clothes might need to be resized, and Catholic questions raised! Married at St Peter and Paul’s, the Church where, to this day, a gold plaque remains, on the seat where my grandma always sat, God rest her soul.
In the 70s the culture was so different, and feminism was almost primitive compared to today. Mother would be expected to stay at home while father went out to work. She went on to have twins (I am one of the pair) and then our brother, all with a four-year interval. Perhaps mother like the number four, or father wasn’t virile during odd or prime numbers. Sadly, mother battled with post-natal depression after all but our brother’s pregnancy..
I have a lot of empathy for her, raising what was essentially a family, while her husband’s job took him away most of the week. He was the chief engineer of the local hospital, and this meant on call, 24 hours a day. He recalls a time when he was brought out in the night, after an electrical fault was raised. When he went to examine the fuse box (I think it was more technical than just flipping the switch and hoping for the best) he was flung across the room by a bolt of electricity. All I can say was he was fully charged that night, with a new perm and in need of new underwear.
He spent a lot of time with the job, leaving mother to care for us at home. I was oblivious to all of this at the young age of three or four and didn’t understand when we were no longer living with our father. I just remember adoring both, watching my mother bake in the kitchen, or sit in the garden with a cigarette and a cup of tea. Or listening to the records my father played his guitar to, or dancing on his feet and doing summersaults while he held my hands.
During more recent times, when family members have reminisced, I learned that when my mother was taken ill and placed under a section in the local mental health establishment, my Grandma Roberts would travel down, for months at a times, and help support the childcare. My uncle, who has passed away now, remembers that father would feed me, while Grandma would feed my twin, right back when we were newborn (by the time I realized I had hands I could quite easily feed myself!). I feel like that may have created a bond with my father, which I have always felt was present.
My parents divorced when I was four years old. My mother controlled the narrative of this for our entire childhood, placing the blame entirely on our father, describing him as selfish, emotionally absent and cruel. It is devastating to children when parents tear each other apart, and we were no different. I remember just believing her. She was our mother, what she said was true; I thought at that young age. Father later told his version, of the day, in the spring of 1979 I think he said, when he arrived home from work, to find the house devoid of furniture and life. He had no pre warning that mother was leaving him, and he must have been utterly bereft. Likely tired and harassed after a long day, and hungry, ready for his evening meal. Only find no table to eat at, no meal and no bed to sleep in. As an adult I can now look at this and see how devastating it must have been for him, as a young man.
When I was twelve, long after my parents had divorced and we were seeing our father every Sunday, the visitations suddenly stopped. At the time, I remember mother telling us some vague story about maintenance and I never quite made sense of what really happened. I have since learned, that my father literally went “off grid”, due to the stress of his career, the pain and trauma of the divorce and breakup of the family. It seemed that it had finally become too much. Sadly, because as children, we had already experienced such a chaotic early childhood, children’s home, fostering, moving to our grandmas, different male role models, this sudden disappearance of our father barely registered. We were resigned to abandonment and just accepted life as it was thrown (literally sometimes) at us.
For the next twenty-six years we would not see our father. In the summer of 2012, after some months of slowly building communications up again with him, we were reunited. I was eight months pregnant with my daughter and remember hugging him again for the first time, outside the house he grew up in, the same one he brought us when we were younger, after the divorce. He seemed not to have changed. We literally picked up where we had left, calmly filling in the gaps of 26 years of life. He has been back in my life ever since. And I have learned so much about the missing years, about the one-sided narrative my mother gave about him, learning that there are always two sides to a story.
My father is autistic. He acknowledges this but, because of the nature of the condition, he refuses to ever go to his doctors. He is 78 and takes no medication, bikes everywhere, and I don’t think he has seen a doctor since they rode bikes and drank whisky. He is a walking encyclopedia; he was in Mensa and has an astounding IQ. He was a musician, and in 1974 was scouted by David Bowie to tour with The Rats as a base guitarist. He turned this opportunity down due to the birth of twins (my sister and I). Father played in local bands in the 70s and 80s, around East Yorkshire, and his talent is amazing.
I may have inherited some of that musical gene, I got a distinction and the highest grade in my piano teachers list of students, sometime in the mid-80s. Sadly, I wasn’t particularly encouraged, and once a teenager I gave it up. I remember the metronome my father bought me. Better still, I remember the piano. This next experience is one of the very reasons that I feel that I have always been spiritually protected. Out of the blue there was a raffle at our school, and the prize was a piano. Even though I was excelling at the gift of music, I had to visit a neighbour up to the road, to practice on her piano in a dark, damp room, thirty minutes a day. I was off school on the day of the raffle with tonsillitis, but the serendipity was uncanny. Somebody pulled out the ticket that was mine, and my twin, who was at school, was able to claim it! We won the piano. Days later, the front window had to be taken out, for it to be delivered into our tiny cottage. I will never forget the joy of receiving that piano and looking up, thinking, even at the young age of nine, that someone was looking after us.
I will talk of this feeling of being protected a lot and perhaps it resonates with you as a reader? Even though my life has been filled with trauma and abuse of every kind, there has always been a kind of silent presence; a veil of protection that wasn’t visible, or explainable. If it didn’t exist, it wouldn’t matter, because the inner child in me felt it regardless. Perhaps that was how she survived, and decades later, poured her story here, in these words. I’ve changed the tenses here and probably broken the grammatical rules. I’ll blame my inner child, before she learned to read and write.
I suppose the essence of these words, was to show you how I came to be part of the dysfunctional family that I grew up with, how mental health, divorce, demanding jobs, and house moves affected the lives of those involved. The words are not intended to direct blame but rather provide the landscape from which such sadness grew. Almost like a recipe for disaster. A mother who battled with depression, suddenly finding herself a single parent to four children under twelve and a father, overwhelmed by the responsibility of a highly skilled and demanding job, suddenly the victim of a family breakdown.
