My dear godson, I’ve decided that I should end all ties with you. I opened a door in the past few days, but your text messages have slammed it shut. You’re 17 and maybe you won’t realise, or care, about what I am doing.
After years of pretending to have a healthy relationship with your parents – when I repressed my anger and frustration at their barely concealed contempt, I severed ties with your father (my brother) and mother, nearly two years ago. At the time, I texted you and said that my door was always open to you.
You never came in that door – you never even looked through the window beside the door. A texted “thank you” for Christmas and birthday cheques was the best you could muster.
I’m not sure when your father started to dislike me – perhaps when I had the audacity to betray my working-class background and go to college. Actually, not just college, university.
I don’t think he could ever forgive me for doing something different with my life; rather than getting a safe, comfortable job with a nice pension in the local council. When he met your mother, he found the perfect partner: she doesn’t think out of the box either.
I don’t mean to demean them. Everyone else they know thinks they are perfectly fine people. You should think the same. I’m just different from them and, to be honest, a difficult person at the best of times.
The funny thing is that you always talked about going to the same university and following the same course of studies that I did (maybe I had some influence in your life, somewhere?). It looked like a bridge where we could meet.
This week I learned that you had failed to get on to that course. I thought I might be of some help to you: I, too, had failed to enter that course on my first attempt, but I persevered. I genuinely thought I could provide unique and helpful guidance.
You took a week to reply to my first text. Yes, it annoyed me: I was reaching out to you and I felt rejected, pointless … a little stupid. Then I reminded myself that you are just 17: stupid and selfish, just like every other teenager.
I would not give up. I tried again. I took a leap in the dark and suggested we meet up, something I have not done since I became estranged from your parents.
You took 24 hours to text that you did not reply earlier because you had been “out all day”. How many times a year do you get a message from your estranged uncle? And this is how you respond? You showed no enthusiasm for my help, but your text had the same polite formality and cold-blooded insincerity that I always associate with your father. Then I realised that, for better or worse, you have, in fact, become another version of your father.
I’m afraid I just can’t take that. We could do the fake relationship dance for many years to come, but I’m not good at quicksteps. I want to leave the dance hall now: I don’t like the music being played.
I wish you well in all you do for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, your life will never be a part of my life again.
Anonymous
