They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

"They fuck you up, your mum and dad

 They may not mean to, but they do…”

Thus begins one of Harun Al-Rashid’s* favourite poems by Philip Larkin. Recently I’ve become aware of the genetic straitjacket that I’ve been wearing for years, without fully realising it.

After the Nightmare on Enniskillen Street (see older entry), Lloyd un-Friends me on Facebook. Not just un-Friends me, but blocks me, just in case I’d try to be his ‘friend’ again. You know how serious that is: when you’re no longer friends on Facebook, that’s the end of the frickin’ line.

Facebook must be pretty dreadful for people with insufficient self-esteem, because when you notice the number of your ‘friends’ dwindling, it doesn’t tell you who un-Friended you, and you can’t help but think: “Who hates me?? Who thinks so little of me that they don’t even want to be my virtual friend??” In my case, after that unfortunate Friday night, I had a pretty clear idea who disappeared from my Facebook page, and thus from my life.

During my turbulent youth, certain circumstances would trigger specific feelings and I’d blindly react on them, not being able to analyse why I felt (or reacted) the way I did. Now I can.

Lloyd un-Friends me.
How do I feel? Indignant. Hey, if anyone should be un-Friending anyone, it should be the other way round! I’m the offended party here!
Disbelieving. Has he really un-Friended and blocked me? Maybe he’s just removed his profile from the site… I double- and triple-check that I can’t reach his Facebook profile and that it still exists.
Regretful, because I’ve been rather fond of Lloyd. Maybe the bad, awkward ending could have been avoided, had I acted differently.

What do I feel like doing? A part of me feels like calling him, or emailing him, to tell him that even though he was out of line, I’m willing to forgive him if he apologises.
I catch myself.
This is too familiar. It’s not the first time that someone’s wronged me and I was the one to proffer the olive branch.
Why?
Because I don’t want to be abandoned.

Do I particularly want to see Lloyd again? Not really. What would we possibly say to one another now?
So does it matter who puts an end to this ‘friendship’, if that’s what both parties want anyway?
Yes.
Why?
Because he made that decision, not I.

Perhaps it won’t surprise anyone who knows me to hear me admit that I’m a control freak; I’ve known this about myself for a while. Perhaps it’s my genetic predisposition, given that both my parents are control freaks in their own way, or perhaps it’s my reaction to the circumstances I found myself in.

"They fill you with the faults they had
 And add some extra, just for you…”

My father has always felt the need to exert control over the only people he could control – us, his immediate family. Presumably he was just reacting to the lack of power he’d had over his own life – having to bang his head against a glass ceiling, time and time again, due to the institutional anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, or having writer’s block – and it felt good to bend at least somebody to his will, to pass on the misery that he himself was feeling in order to make up for this overall impotence. My mother is a cleanliness freak. She may not feel like she has control over many areas of her life, but she can and will control the amount of dust and dirt in her house.

“For they were fucked up in their turn
 By fools in old-style hats and coats…”

As for me, this need for control has dominated my life for as long as I can remember. It caused me to rebel against my parents’ irrational and erratic way of doing things, to get a job as soon I was legally allowed to work to break my father’s financial control over me, to finally change my name to one I’m happy with. It has defined my relationship patterns with men – keeping them at arm’s length, ostensibly so that they wouldn’t have much of a hold over me (though that didn’t work, for reasons I’m about to explain), choosing men who on the surface seemed as different from my father as they could be, in a kneejerk reaction to my turbulent relationship with him, and freaking out when they made certain decisions because my other weakness is my fear or rejection and abandonment, which I’ve only just become full aware of. Sometimes, being a control freak is no bad thing; I have no physical addictions and I do nothing to excess - I don't drink much and I don't overeat, because I'll be damned if anything has too much of a hold on me.

The Lloyd fiasco and my reaction to him un-Friending me reminded me of my first ever breakup at the age of sixteen. Even though I could tell after several days that my romance with Fred* wasn’t going to win prizes for romance of the century, I still held on, thinking that maybe things change with time. They didn’t, and he broke up with me. I didn’t take it too well, even though logically, I knew that we had to break up. Fred’s* a really lovely guy and he was concerned that he broke my heart. He didn’t, but the whole episode bruised my ego and triggered the first response of its kind – the feeling of loss of control and despair over the breakup, precisely because he made that decision, and not I.

I also remember clearly an instance in which Ed the Nudist, after visiting me at university, inexplicably took off in the morning without a word, ignoring my running after his car. When he didn’t return my calls afterwards, I felt a paralysing fear. “What if he was dead?! What if I never see him again?! What if he never wants to see me again?!”

It was exactly the same paralysing fear, the same cold, sick feeling in my stomach, the same panic that I felt as an eight year old, when I was left at Frankfurt airport to look after the luggage cart while my family disappeared somewhere. As far as I was concerned, they would never come back: something terrible had happened to them on their way to the bathroom, and I was left all alone in the world.

When I was nine or ten, I had the same pre-bedtime routine. I would ask my mum the same questions and in exactly the same order (I’ve got a touch of OCD, you see). “You’re not going to go away, are you? You’re not going to die, are you?” And my mother, because she loves me, lied to me and promised the impossible.

With Ed the Nudist, getting in touch with him became all-important and I must’ve left a zillion messages on his answering machine. Likewise, when Pantera threatened to run to Griselle when I wouldn’t do his bidding, my first impulse was to placate him in any way possible. Why? Surely, being abandoned by Ed the Nudist or Pantera should’ve been a cause for celebration rather than concern?

I now realise that the men in question were immaterial; it was the idea of abandonment, full stop, that I couldn’t deal with. No wonder I was so cut up about a friend’s death last year, for what’s death but the ultimate abandonment?

Where does all this fear come from? When I worked in Ukraine an investigative assistant five years ago, my friend Natasha the psychiatrist suggested that I read “A General Theory of Love”. The book gathered dust on my shelf for three years before I read it, and when I did, it illuminated some of my distinctive behavioural patterns and helped me to make sense of them.

It spoke of relationship patterns built over the first few months and years of a child’s life, and how one’s early relationship with one’s parents inescapably affects one’s adult relationships…unless you do something about it. It gave three examples: the consistent mother, who knows exactly when to support and comfort her child, and when to let them be independent, so the child grows up confident and independent; the erratic mother, who means well, who is mostly affectionate and supportive, but sometimes not around, so the child often displays fear and clinginess; and finally the neglectful mother, who ignores her child and its needs, and who grows up often unable to build good relationships with other because they were never given the tools.

When my sister was born, I was three years old, and my mother had to raise us with virtually no help at all; my father was always at work, there were no relatives nearby, and half the time was spent trying to obtain common household goods. It was the Soviet Union, after all. My sister was very demanding when she was small, and consequently my mother had little time or energy for me and I was often left to my own devices. One of my first memories consists of sitting in the snow and trying to dig out my little snow boot, which had gotten stuck. I was playing alone, which was often the case. This had the effect of forcing me to become independent, but also creating irrational fears and complexes that I’ve only started to acknowledge and deal with recently.

For about a decade, my sister and I fought like cat and dog because I was unable to vocalise what I subconsciously felt. It’s such a common problem between siblings and it made me laugh at how absurdly simple the explanation for it was when I recently watched an episode of “Frasier” where Frasier and Niles were discussing the very same thing. “You stole my mummy!” Frasier shouted. So obvious.

When my sister and I compared notes recently, it was interesting to note that even though she had 95% of our mother’s attention as a child, we both exhibited symptoms of the second scenario – that of an erratic mother. The damage is not irreparable, of course – my sister and I are very close now, and I no longer have a fear of water or the telephone, among other things. When I was younger, I hated calling people on the phone or – even worse – answering the phone if complete strangers called. An older friend tried to cure me of this, and she was successful. Now not only do I not think twice about calling complete strangers, but I can do so in three languages!

The negative relationship patterns don’t disappear overnight, but becoming aware of them is the first step towards breaking out of a destructive loop. That’s not to say that there isn’t the odd irrational flare-up, but now I can identify it for what it is, and ride it out.

If abstract abandonment is difficult for me to deal with, then perceived abandonment and rejection by someone who’d played a large and positive role in my life can be even more difficult to cope with. When an older friend of mine came back into my life after several years absence, saying that she’d like us to be in touch again, I was overjoyed, because her positive input into my life had been beyond measure when I was a troubled teenager. Yet when after that, she deferred from meeting and then stopped responding to my messages altogether, it left me completely bewildered and triggered the predictable stream of irrational thoughts: “What have I done to push her away? Am I so hideous? Is my company so unbearable?”

It particularly stung because many years ago, she’d paid me one of the greatest compliments of my life, saying that if she’d had a daughter, she’d have imagined her to be like me. Since I was far from being the ideal daughter to my own parents, to know that I was the image of the ideal daughter for someone whom I greatly respected was simply incredible.

The difference is that now, unlike before, the rational explanation overrides the irrational thoughts of abandonment and I am able to understand that my feelings and reality don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. She has an entire life that I know nothing about and which has nothing to do with me, and there are dozens of explanations as to why we haven’t as yet met up for a catch-up drink.

In his poem, Philip Larkin goes on to conclude that because you’ve been screwed up by your parents, you will undoubtedly do the same to your kids, so you should refrain from procreating:

“Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

I don’t agree with the last part. Though subconscious parental influence can be difficult to pinpoint and even more difficult to shake off completely, it’s certainly not impossible. Besides, pretty much everyone’s parents pass on some kind of negative influence or crippling neurosis, so do we give up procreating altogether? My concerns as to whether or not I’d make a good mother due to the host of neuroses I could potentially pass on to my offspring does not automatically mean that I’d make a decent parent or disqualify me from motherhood; if said offspring can identify those neuroses, they can fight them.

I’ve acknowledged my Achilles’s heel, my twin hobbles of the need for control and my fear of abandonment, but they alone do not account for my persistence in seeking out and trying to maintain dysfunctional relationships. Time to dig deeper….