Happy Families

I'm going to have to break one of the promises I made to myself when setting up this blog. I promised that I would not include anything too emotional in it - but really, all our views and experiences are informed by emotion anyway, so it was a silly resolution to make.

I can't wait until I go to university. More specifically, I can't wait until I get out of here.

I have never had a normal family. I don't mean that in the nice, eccentric sense. I DO have a junkie aunt, but that's not why I want to go to Cambridge and forget about blasted 3 The Warren. I have never had a normal family in that I have never had parents who have loved one another, and in that nothing I believed in when I was little was true. When I was younger, I believed I had Happy Family TM. There was Mummy, Daddy, a cat and a naughty little sister. I thought all families were like mine.

Last summer, when it had all gone all wrong and I'd discovered that Happy Family TM had never existed for me, I went round my aunt and uncle's and discovered what it was to see a married couple who loved one another. I have never seen such a painful contrast in real life before; if I didn't know better I would call it literary. December last year saw a visit round a friend's, in a house that was civilised, where said friend had been taken to concerts, and the sofas were neatly organised, and the lounge was well-decorated. Irrelevant, but I find myself detesting everything about my 'family.' Every room is disgusting. Every person in it has a problem. The pictures hanging on the walls are of lies. I hate everything from that awful ornamental dining Edwardian couple to the hallway green carpet. Everything is coloured with what went wrong.

Everyone around me seems to think that it is all stopped, all finished. That the problems of last year are indeed 'the problems of last year.' And who can blame them, for how can a break-up take over a year?

I know very few people who have not been damaged by their parents. I can list a whole host of people who have - people who are insecure, people who are frightened, people who can do nothing but hurt having been hurt themselves. And how can their parents help it, having been damaged themselves? This sounds really overly emotional and exaggerated, but nothing has made me more cynical than my own family. Of course I love my parents - but right now it's a distorted love, because, to put it bluntly, I have a father who has yet to display any real depth of feeling and a mother who tells me everything, as though I'm the adult and she's the child. I should certainly not be going round other peoples' houses and wishing I could exchange lives.

Blood is a lot thinner than one thinks. If I 'believe' in any 'proper adult' it is in someone who probably doesn't think about me for longer than a few minutes a day, if that. Platonically, I love them nonetheless.