How to break bad news
When you begin to find your voice with people who shared your experiences but not your perception of them. The second in a series of short scenes about taking emotional space.
Walking the dogs with my sister, the conversation turns to puddings.
‘I don’t remember mum making many desserts’ I say. ‘Apart from the chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce.’
My sister could barely hide her incredulity and then spent the majority of the hour long walk recalling all of the various desserts we’d eaten at home as children, few of which I remembered.
Talking about our childhood invariably makes my sister melancholic. She often uses affectionate phrases about those times which jar with me because they feel like a narrow version of the truth.
Walking along the path by the side of the school, Flynn is sniffing by a hedge looking for bits of sandwich strewn carelessly by the children as they wander home. He’d found most of a cheese baguette just days earlier and is keen to repeat the experience.
My sister asks,
‘What would you say about your childhood? Would you say it had been happy?’
It feels loaded.
‘No. I would say that my childhood was unhappy.’
She is taken aback, perhaps by the certainty of my reply or maybe because it’s not what she wants to hear.
It’s not the first time I’ve had to resist a reshaping of my truth.
Shortly after my mother died, me, my brother and sister were sorting through her house readying it for sale. Sitting in my dining room having eaten dinner together for the first time in more than twenty years, my sister said,
‘We didn’t have a bad childhood did we?’
My brother agreed, although there are eleven years between us so I barely know him let alone how life was when he was small.
I said nothing, unwilling to destroy a fragile moment of comforting nostalgia.
I didn’t understand why they saw things so differently. Maybe they’d just decided to.
Back on the dog walk, feeling I owe my sister more than my violent rebuttal, I offer an explanation.
‘I was unhappy because I hated the constant arguments. Mostly I felt caught in the crossfire, or totally invisible.’
‘Oh Graham, I didn’t know that.’
‘I spent most of my childhood afraid that mum would leave us.’
The words hung in the air with the elderberries.
‘Mum always felt she was closest to you. She used to say that you were the only one on her wavelength and that me and Adrian were ‘just like your father’.’
‘That’s because I always worked hard to get onto her wavelength. It felt much safer than staying on mine.’
It was an unusually hot day for mid-September and it seemed to be getting hotter.
The conversation lulled as we made our way up through the trees and back towards the main road.
Changing the subject, I ask my sister if she’ll walk Daisy while I’m away on a training day.
‘Sure. What’s it about?’
‘It’s called ‘Intimacy - The Impact Of Attachment On Adult Relationships’.
We reach the end of her road and, as we part ways, she says again,
‘I’m sorry Graham, I didn’t know.’
I say that I’m sorry too, but mostly because it’s taken over forty years to tell my sister the truth about my childhood.
On ‘Sideways’ this week, we’re talking about a feeling of emptiness. Where does it come from, what does it indicate, and what can we do about it?
There’s also some chat about paper aeroplanes, giraffes’ maths ability, and I do surprisingly well at the weekly lyric quiz.
If you’re feeling a bit hollow you could do worse than have a listen, although you’ll have to wait until Thursday.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.
That line about getting onto someone else’s wavelength because it felt safer than staying on your own really got me. Children can become frighteningly good at disappearing like that
That sounds really hard, Graham. Thank you for your honesty.