A Turnout for the Books

Wow, now there’s a turnout for the books: my father asking me to review a short story he wants to enter for a competition!

Let me explain. My father is nearly 75 and born into what in England we call a “Victorian family”, a family with supposedly Victorian strictures such as “Children should be seen and not heard” and “Spare the rod, spoil the child”, a world apart from the 21st Century and my vision of what life could be like one day. In this world, “love’ is a word rarely spoken and most definitely not in the same breath as “you”! In that world, part of toughening a child was keeping the compliments to a minimum and the criticisms to a maximum in order to extract the greatest growth or keep them in their place.

So this was the world I was born into, as if a belated arrival in another era. In this world, I made the Victorian behaviour mean things they were not necessarily designed to mean: that I wasn’t loved and was not worth much or important to my father. Sad and perhaps even far-fetched as it may sound, these perceptions filled my psyche at a deep level and, though buried deep out of sight and conscious thought, it dictated my every behaviour, my self perception, and formed much of what we now call my “ego”.

My father was a teacher, in fact, a very talented if old-fashioned teacher who managed to teach others to a level that exceeded the expectations of family and other teachers alike. But at home it was different and his Dickensian strictness just further fed my negative self image and being born into the first wave of state schooling that belittled the value of formal grammar in the teaching of English but I was also born to a man who taught that subject in old fashioned ways and faced what seems an insurmountable barrage of criticism that, though perhaps not wrong, crushed my sensitive spirit so much that by 18 I chose sooner to write my poetry in French than my native English, confident that in this way I would avoid the heart-wrenching invalidation that I had faced for years.

Indeed, it was another 27 years before I would seek to rise out of the cocoon that bred ‘Maitland, the writer’ to have me emerge slowly in the face of false obstacles to be my true self. It was a slow process, one which is in effect still “work in progress” and though, by and large, I have now shed the false image that stood mirrored before me, I will always have its reminder to contrast what I have become and perhaps sometimes goad me on to ever more challenging feats.

It is in this set of circumstances that in recent times and after many decades of relative estrangement, my father and I have at last begun to connect and have a relationship that is worthy of the labels “parent-child” and “loving”. I am talking only of months and in that short time of mutual exploration I have bared my heart and in exchange enjoyed his perhaps quiet but certain mutual appreciation. To my delight, this recent shift has had him compliment me on my “excellent” letter writing skills (that 25 years as a lawyer had no doubt honed) and then most recently he asked for my feedback on his own writings, shot stories for online submission to a competition.

Besides the obvious potential this offered for unattractive “revenge” (unattractive in a fledgling space of love and respect), I felt the more appropriate appreciation for God’s generosity in bringing us to this place of mutual respect in which I had also sought guidance to compensate for a lack of a formal grammar education. I thought it such Divine perfection to have led us slowly to this space to heal the rifts and false barriers to the natural love that had had me shed so many tears in father/son stories in films and on television over the years. This truly is a turnout for the books, a turnout for MY books. Thank you, God.