Older late diagnosed or self identifying people, do you ever wonder how you made it to adulthood?

Yup…I wonder that too. I have recently cut our contact down to the odd phone call and personally I believe my mum should come with a health warning ️ 

I hope this time with mum doesn’t affect you too adversely Roy 

I say everyday that I’m going to be more patient and not shutdown, I don’t watch the evening news anymore as it’s too stressful. I watched it yesterday as I wanted to see what the new Prime Minister had to say, mother came straight into my annex and sat down. It was like watching the news with Alf Garnet narrating it. “ He’s useless, she’s a liar, he’s for the immigrants.”

Theres never a good word about anyone or anything, I don’t think the 1970’s had any rules,  at 8 years old I fitted a new piece of flex and a plug to an electric fire, I would refill the glass bottle on the paraffin heater, nobody batted an eye lid. I think back and my brother and I were fed and had a bed, that was about it, the rest was for us to workout.

My dad was a very angry man in the 70s, he would watch the news and rage about immigration (nothing changes) thought Enoch Powell was the best politician and heck did we argue. However after his death I managed to piece together his history, what happened to him in WW2 as a lorry driver and understood that his anger wasn’t at me, or my mum, or the politicians of the 70s but at the people and officers and sadists in Germany who did the dreadful things he had to see and help put right (he was part of the British unit which liberated Belsen but saw much else). And so I came to terms with how he was and forgave him, in memory at least, and am at peace with those years of our relationship. 

Anger often gets internalised and then comes out displaced onto a proxy. It certainly happened to me too. My anger is at several people, several of whom are thankfully dead, and the Roman Catholic church, who are beyond my ability to even remotely influence or have meaningful exchanges with. The proxy I cannot tell you about as in this age of “group think” I would be ostracised for verbalising it

Alice

Thanks for your reply, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said , my grandparents lived with us when I was a child, they were true East Enders, my grandfather also helped liberate Belsen, he spent 6 months with a digger pushing bodies into holes, as many died after liberation as when under German rule, My Nan knitted him a long scarf that he coiled around his face to stop the stench , 1940,s PPE. 

He wasn’t an unkind person but always very distant, I remember him watching a program on Mosley and he black shirts, I thought his dinner was going to go through the television screen, he had lived through part of it and engaged against them. He said he had fought fascists abroad and then I come home to it. I think a lot of that generation had seen things that no human should ever see.

I’ve watched documentaries from the 1940,s to present and each generation states that the country is finished and washed up. I have a Northern relation who grew up through the miners strike, he still hates a certain political party, his children have inherited the same hate.

Thanks for your reply, I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said , my grandparents lived with us when I was a child, they were true East Enders, my grandfather also helped liberate Belsen, he spent 6 months with a digger pushing bodies into holes, as many died after liberation as when under German rule, My Nan knitted him a long scarf that he coiled around his face to stop the stench , 1940,s PPE. 

He wasn’t an unkind person but always very distant, I remember him watching a program on Mosley and he black shirts, I thought his dinner was going to go through the television screen, he had lived through part of it and engaged against them. He said he had fought fascists abroad and then I come home to it. I think a lot of that generation had seen things that no human should ever see.

I’ve watched documentaries from the 1940,s to present and each generation states that the country is finished and washed up. I have a Northern relation who grew up through the miners strike, he still hates a certain political party, his children have inherited the same hate.