Mothering Sunday

I haven't had a 'proper' mother-son relationship with my Mum for over twenty years and I won't ever have that bond in my life. Too much has gone on in the past and to be honest it would involve the diplomatic skills of somebody far cleverer than me to make me trust either of my parents again.

That said, my return to family history matters over the past eighteen months or so has made me realious that I am probably closer emotionally to some of my dead ancestors at this point in my life than to those relatives still alive. The whole thing has got me thinking about the process of being a parent and that of being a child. If you have children I suppose that you never stop being both physically, but the emotional bond that once held you together through those early years of your life, through the difficult teenage years and then on into the first steps of adulthood seem as if they belong to different characters then where I feel I am in my life at this moment.

For the past five years I've only seen my parents maybe ten times, but last Sunday I decided that being as it was my Mum's 70th birthday Nathalie and I would drive across the county to visit them. This being Dorset and heading south-east to north-west the journey takes over an hour whereas in some parts of the universe it would take thirty minutes tops. We stayed for a couple of hours and talked about everything and nothing, by weird coincidence my Dad started telling Nathalie how good I'd been at football (I wrote about my footballing abilities on here last month). Things were going well, not too strained, when my Dad brought up the subject of my late brother's wife and family. It struck me that people don't really change. After everthing that has happened, Nigel dying, us not talking etc, my Dad still wants to control people's lives. I shouldn't have been surprised but I was.

I now have a moral dilemma. At the end of April my Dad will be 70, should I make the effort or shouldn't I?