The Black Sheep

Life’s What You Make It ~ Talk Talk

‘Life’s What You Make It’ by Talk Talk. This song is the anthem to my life in the present. I have it on repeat as if trying to forge new neural pathways of belief and love for myself. A song from the bosom of my wonder years. It soothes me like a baby sucking on its mother’s titty. And yet it emboldens my fiftysomething desire to get on the front foot in life in spite of my sticky socio-emotional impediments. What are these impediments of which I speak? 

Five years into my incarceration, in all festering resentment, my Mom finally erupted like a volcano and gave me the hairdryer treatment whilst on a visit with my younger sister in the Trevor Gibbens Unit. “WHY DID YOU DO IT?!” she said. My younger sister instinctively took the wind out of my Mum’s sails in saying “we’re not here for that!” Since that moment my Mom has looked at me with furrowed brow and judging eyes as if to say “I raised you better than that” and she’s right and yet also wrong too. It is true that I come from good law-abiding stock. I had options but, ironically, I was blinded by unresolved childhood traumas. So when faced with losing everything I’d ever wanted in my Babymother and our family, in all desperation, I felt compelled to choose poorly. Since then, however, she has been reduced to a state of indifference to hide her shame of me.

My older sister has silenced me, refusing all discourse, so disgusted is she with me.

My older brother, who also went through a traumatic breakup with his wife, is cordial but surreptitiously pissed that I haven’t fled England and couched in Qatar with him.

My Dad sadly met his demise five years into my incarceration though not before I physically attacked him while on remand. I was deluded, hopelessly immersed in abject paranoia that my family had conspired to bring about the destruction of my relationship with my babymother.

As you may have gathered, my younger sister is protectively supportive to the point where it sometimes feels like she has me wrapped in cotton wool. I catch myself in all paranoia, wondering what contempt or doubt she might have for me. And yet in spite of being the youngest she appears, from a philosophical perspective, to be the wisest of us siblings. Case in point; she sent me this YouTube video by Masood Boomgaard.

“Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes, you are going to fuck-up again in the future. Quite possibly in the most spectacular fashion. Why worry about yesterday’s fuck-ups, when you have tomorrow’s fuck-ups to look forward to? You are a fuck-up and fucking up and fucking up is part of your growth process - embrace the process!” ~ Masood Boomgaard.

My extended family; Aunts and Uncles, what have you are, I assume, equally apoplectic given that my Mom has kept them at arm’s length with relation to the possibility of any engagement with me. She recently relented on this ploy and passed my number to one of my Uncle’s. Having explained my back story and what led me to crime, he said “you explain yourself so well, what I can’t understand is the violence!” This is a man who was my favourite uncle when I was a kid yet he now had me feeling like I was in the dock again. I nervously explained myself only too well aware that I had nowhere to hide. Seemingly satisfied he went onto ascertaining my employment status now I am no longer incarcerated, with the surreptitiously damning indictment, “the Devil makes work for idle hands”. I was surprised at the vitriol laced with fire and brimstone, as someone who I had perceived to have lived a liberal western lifestyle. There was no hiding the christianity my grandmother had imbued him with. And yet there he was high-handedly yet feebly attempting to browbeat me with the possibility that even after ten years of incarceration I hadn’t learned my lesson. 

My younger Sister, Mom and Uncle are united in the belief that it is ultimately my son’s right, at the age of eighteen, to choose to not have contact with me in light of my crimes. For it is actually a surreptitious right hook of biblical proportions that says, ‘I love you but “you’ve made your bed, now you must lie in it.”’ Apparently these stiff-upper-lippers are “woke” when it suits them even when their aim is completely off. For while it is his right, something they did not need point out to me, it is not necessarily his conviction given that his caregivers, my ex-wife’s family, were staunchly, and irrationally, opposed to me, long before my misdemeanours. To my mind, his opinion is not his own, it is his caregivers. What he is enduring is Stockholm Syndrome and for that I am truly sorry.

So rather than nest with my brother abroad, I have foolheartedly chosen to locate myself as close to my son without infringing on the exclusion zone that the state constructed up on his Mom’s behalf. I was gaslit, demoralised and foolhardy. In a desperate attempt to atone, I have chosen to hunker down in the hell that is Adult Care, afforded to me as a community citizen on a conditional discharge. Infantilised by a service for the reprobate they believe me to be. Mud sticks even though I’ve done my time.

It’s the perfect shitstorm from which it sometimes feels like there is no escape. The shame and embarrassment that traps me. The trap, that feels akin to the Phantom Zone in which General Zod, Ursa and Non were imprisoned, was the intersection forged between Catholicism, old-fashioned “do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do” discipline and the rise of woke-ism. I grew up in a binary world where you were either good or you were bad and never the twain shall meet. I was imbued with this thinking in my formative years and it was reinforced in my teens. But it nestled in the long shadow of the post-second-world-war-stiff-upper lip era that Gen X’ers like me grew up in. The comics I so loved were filled with heroes and villains. Anti-heroes weren't really a thing in the eighties, too nuanced for the world I was built on. Normalising the saint/sinner paradox was what I needed back then but retrospective wishful thinking doesn’t help me now. For to add insult to injury, woke-ism has now brought us cancel culture. And I’m a series of red flags to many rather than simply a human-being.

Life’s What You Make It ~ Talk Talk

Baby, life's what you make it,

Can't escape it,

Baby, yesterday's favourite,

Don't you hate it,

Baby life's what you make it,

Don't back date it,

Baby, don't try to shade it,

Beauty is naked,

Baby, life's what you make it,

Celebrate it,

Anticipate it,

Yesterday's faded,

Nothing can change it,

Life's what you make it.

I was yesterday’s favourite so, yes, I do hate it. But even as the golden child I felt othered, like the Black Sheep of the family. It is, however, a reminder not to get bogged down in rewinding the past and yearning for how things used to be or trying to fast forward into the future on flights of fancy. It’s about staying present. The urge to atone for my sins is real even though I don’t necessarily know how so what’s the point?! ‘Life’s what you make it!’ is a mantra for me. That’s why I’m not just dipping my toes into this thing called Substack, I’m belly-flopping into the deep end!