Growing up normal
image: josefnovak33
I grew up in the 1960’s/70’s. It was an interesting time. There was social reform and upheaval occurring all round. When you’re in it, you’re the last one to know it. What you encounter sets the parameters of your experience and defines for you what is normal.
It’s one of those big stick words, ‘normal’, because it means everything and nothing at the same time. Normal is for each of us an entirely different set of weights, balances, tensions, privileges, engagements and so on. Like everyone I grew up in a normal setting. What I was surrounded by was completely normal. In this I must establish a principle of third party anonymity, those whom I refer to whose opinions I have not solicited in this context. Normal in the sense that it was all that I knew, as indeed is the case for all children, irrespective of their setting.
This subject, as I have posted previously, relates to the context of my Mechanics of Happiness work. A kind of ‘who do you think you are?’ colours staked to the mast kind of engagement. I believe firmly that a person is measured by where they have come from not by where they are at any given time. It’s a bit like seeing someone as a two dimensional cutaway as opposed to a three dimensional being. If you only see where they are now, you miss the important part, the journey they have undertaken to be at that point.
Perhaps you are familiar with the old joke, how is it possible for an idiot to earn a small fortune? Start with a large one. I’ve always interpreted that as an inheritance joke, I may be wrong, but that has always put me in mind of certain people I’ve known who have managed to take a situation of privilege and abundance and create something very mediocre from that. Those who, in my assessment, have managed to turn something shining and bright into something dull and tarnished. Of course the counterpoint is also true.
There are those who have been dealt a duff hand and managed to extricate themselves from multiple impoverishments and place themselves favourably despite this. I refer here to their psychological. emotional, and material wellbeing and not just a reflection on their bank balance, which so often seems to be the only arbiter of success in our too shallow by far culture of materialistic values.
When I was older and had moved far enough away from the epicentre of my upbringing I began to understand it better and perceive it differently. The things that for me had become normal I began to understand were far from the western nuclear family archetype. But you only know what you know as a child, it is impossible to extricate yourself from your situation because you exist as the product of that situation and until certain faculties become active in the post-pubescent state, things such as critical reasoning, it is like trying to explain water to a goldfish.
My mother had me when she was seventeen. She was a product of, among other things, the Irish Industrial school system, a state run institution whose existence is something of a national embarrassment to the Irish. Essentially this was a form of social control and state sponsored slave labour whereby children were removed from their families for the most feeble of excuses and set to work in such areas as light industry, agriculture, laundry work and so on. The system was open to abuse, the children were themselves abused and an underclass was created in Ireland of those who survived the institution of the Industrial School system. Suffice it to say that these people came out the other end, and many did not, without an education and with a whole caravan of hangups and misconceptions about life and themselves in general. I cannot speak harshly enough about the monstrosity of this system and about the Irish authorities who have tried to minimise the phenomena and particularly the Catholic church who have been in institutional denial over the whole thing for decades.
My mother and her family fled to England to build a new life for themselves. I was ultimately a product of this. I shrink from calling them refugees but by definition this is what they were. It seems odd to call a family of Irish emigres to England refugees - there were no burning cities or war-torn wastelands - and there is such a relatively huge movement of people between the two countries anyway, but that is what they were. They, my mother along with her mother and brother, arrived traumatised by their experiences and desperate to make a fresh start.
That my grandmother managed to get these two children out of the system is miraculous enough and took monumental tenacity and courage on her part. Many involved in the post Industrial School rehabilitation work had never heard of such a thing. My grandmother had been an orphan herself as a child and when her own family had been unable to keep her she was placed in the Industrial School system. So there were two generations of people whose experiences in their formative years had been less than ideal. My maternal grandmother held a healthy contempt for Catholic nuns and priests that I never understood as a child but became more clear as I discovered the situation they had all fled from. The Industrial School system was run by loosely assembled Catholic societies with such names as the Christian Brothers and the Magdalen Sisters that were, in many instances, no more than fronts for collections of sadists and paedophiles who sheltered beneath the veneer of respectability that these ‘religious societies’ were afforded by the Irish state.
The detail of their story is a private one, though it is shared by many others who experienced similar indignities at the hands of this system. Suffice it to say that they took on board views, attitudes and psychologies that have stayed with them like parasites throughout their days. That they found themselves in these institutions was, bizarrely, a matter of shame for relatives who contrived to blame the children for their situation and shunned and disowned them. Indeed I only discovered this disgraceful history by chance well into my adult years and many relatives still deny point blank that it ever happened which is painful for those who lived through the Industrial Schools as it diminishes the validity of their experience.
These children were told that they were the architects of their own situation and that in many instances they were damned, destined to go to hell. I know that members of my family are still traumatised by this irresponsible indoctrination. They are very wary of the concept of heaven and hell, fearful of the supernatural reach of the church and shrug wistfully as if to say ‘it still goes on’ when the latest revelations about Catholic institutional abuse in children’s institutions hit the media as they wend their weary way through the courts.
The damage wraught by unscrupulous individuals in the name of the church or the common good or some other such spurious end has penetrated the psyches of these individuals deeply and left many of those children as damaged adults. I don’t really have words to summon the fullness of contempt that I harbour for individuals who can abuse positions of trust and responsibility they have been placed in ostensibly to care for lost children. If there is truly justice in this or any other world they will have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
OK so not a jolly post I admit but it has been said that a people who do not know their history can have no concept of their future. That is as true for an individual as it is for us all collectively. If we do not know where we have come from how can we know where we are and how can we know where we are going to?