Expectations

I read - skimmed, really, because I knew I'd get down if I got too heavily into it - the latest blog post from a blogger who's been writing his 'memoirs' online for a while now. Unless I've misunderstood where his latest chapters are heading, he's talking about the phase of his life where he left his 'true love' to go out into the world, in his case by joining the military. My initial thoughts were 'Why do it?' Even allowing for the strictures of time and place - this part of the blogger's life goes back to the early 1970's - why leave the love of your life, just because of the disapproval of the world. But, when I thought about it more logically, how different is it from what I've done with my life?
The practicalities of my situation were slightly different, in that my 'true love', as I wrote in 'A Loved Boy' a few days ago, wasn't ever a realistic candidate to be my life partner, because it wasn't what he wanted, wasn't what he was able to be. But why, then, did I choose to go the way that I did, why get into a position where, if I'd been braver and more honest with myself, I'd have said 'this isn't who I am, and this isn't what I want'?
The only answer I can come up with is other people's expectations. People - family, friends, workmates - have an image of who you are, of how you should behave, of what you should want. In the face of those expectations, there are two ways you can go. You can be what you are, what you want to be, and risk the consequences of disillusioning those in your life, who may be very important to you, risk losing friends, being disowned by family, ostracised by workmates, but keep to your principles, or you can bow to convention, and follow the conventional path. Portray yourself as what they see you as, do the things you're 'supposed' to do. But, then, whose life are you living? More theirs than yours, certainly in my case. Hindsight is such a useless commodity, but I definitely feel I made completely the wrong decision about how to deal with the loss of the love of my life. Wrong for me, and wrong for others who have been affected. Any volunteers to tell my wife that she's wasted 20 years of her life living with someone who isn't who she thinks he is?

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Mask, smile and dream. And today.

I always try, as I go about my everyday life, to keep my inner demons in check. I might not be sparkling company all the time, but I do my best to be no worse than neutral in my dealings with the outside world. I failed in that regard yesterday, at least once, and maybe twice.
When I got to work at lunchtime, one of my colleagues, mostly in jest, I think, made a comment about my not looking very happy with life. I just shrugged it off by saying something about my well-documented dislike of late shifts, but I was disappointed with myself that I couldn't keep my feelings better hidden. All I want at work is to be one of the crew, and not draw attention to myself - there are too many skeletons lurking in my cupboard to want anyone to think they have to take an interest in me.
The second incident may not have had anything to do with me, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had. When I was leaving the station at the Surrey end on my way back from work, being Friday night, there were a number of teenage-ish people about, including a group of mid-teen girls. One of the them called out 'Put a smile on your face, sad-faced man.' I wasn't the only person emerging from the station entrance at the time, so she could have been referring to someone else, but it would have been quite appropriate to have been aimed at me. My mask was certainly slipping yesterday, it seems. I'll have to find a smiley one instead.
I read Lucent last night. Many might say that reading my own stories for pleasure is a bit on the masturbatory side, but I happen to think it's a good story, and I'd re-read it if it had been written by someone else, so why not? Probably as a result, I ended up by dreaming about someone called Alex overnight. I don't remember much about the dream, except that the atmosphere of the scenario was warm and happy, and that the 'Alex' in my dream wasn't any of the three people called Alex I know personally, and wasn't the 'Alex' from Lucent, either. The subconscious works in mysterious ways.
I started this post before I left for work this afternoon, but ran out of time to finish it, so I'll add today's doings as a postscript. Not much to say, really - I spoke to my daughter briefly earlier on, but she says she's fine, and, from the evidence of the phone call, she sounds pretty much her normal self. I sent her a little e-mail that was designed to encourage a bit of discussion, but she wasn't biting, at least not yet. I told my wife I that I still think she owes my daughter an apology, but she wasn't biting, either. It's a good job I'm not a fisherman - I wouldn't even catch a cold!

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Late nights and early morning calls

I didn't get back to my accommodation until after midnight last night - we had an appalling evening at work, and we were short-handed as well, so, because of the specific job I was covering, part of which involves staying until a full night shift staff is in place, or 11:30, whichever is the earlier, I was stuck at work for an hour and a half longer than normal. By the time I'd wound down a bit and caught up with cyberworld, it was pretty damn late, so the fact that my wife rang and woke me up just after 8:00 this morning wasn't all that welcome.
The call had the normal de rigueur financial element - it's my payday today, so a certain amount of discussion about what was to go where was required - before my wife went on to talk about how my daughter 'seems to be on another planet', is restless, can't concentrate on her homework, forgets things, etc, etc. Sounds like she's in love, to me, and I said so. She's meeting up with her drama school friend this afternoon, and spending a few hours with her. I don't think the distrait behaviour and afternoon/early evening to come are unconnected. My wife wants me to speak to our daughter. How I'm supposed to do that without 'spilling the beans' remains to be seen.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Integrity

My wife rang me earlier this morning, just for a chat while she waited for one of her work clients to meet her. Given what she told me, I wish she hadn't.
After the customary mention of money, she started talking about our daughter. She's been spending a lot of time on the phone lately to one of her drama school friends. Just natural teenage girl habitat, you might justifiably say. My wife said 'If I tell you this, you'll be angry with me'. My thought was she'd been listening in on my daughter's calls, and I said so. No, not that. Worse, in my opinion. She's been reading the girl's diary. I was angry, but kept it under control. It wasn't said in unequivocal words, but it seems that my daughter has a crush, at least, on her drama school friend, and has been questioning her sexuality as result. In her diary. Which my wife has now surreptitiously read.
Several reactions on my part, most of which I passed on to my wife. The main, immediate concern, is honesty. We've always tried to impress on out daughter the importance of telling the truth. How can my wife, in all conscience, now talk about issues like that when she's done what she's done. It's an utter breach of privacy, of trust. She said she did it because my daughter never talks to her about issues in her life. Does she really think this is likely to encourage my daughter to open up? I'm now in a real dilemma. I feel I should tell my daughter, but if I do, I'm likely to cause all sorts of ructions in their relationship. Even if I just suggest she's careful about where she keeps her diary, it will give the game away.
More generally, there's an issue of acceptance. I believe we are what we are, and no amount of moralising can possibly change that. I'm not at all convinced that my wife agrees with that. I, personally, don't think my daughter is gay, but then, I haven't read the diary. The girl's take on it is that she thinks she might be bisexual, apparently. There's some evidence, my wife says, that someone has put a homophobic comment on my daughter's Facebook page, but that it's been deleted. I've told my wife that I think our daughter's orientation is none of our business, which is what I believe. If she needs help from us, I hope she's aware that she can ask for it, any time. If she doesn't, that's her choice, too.
This isn't coming out very fluently. There are potential 'cans of worms' everywhere. How can I encourage my daughter to be herself, and encourage my wife to follow the same line, when I'm living a lie myself?  It would be ironic indeed if I was outed by my daughter being outed. Messy and complicated doesn't even begin to describe it. I get a feeling that this issue is going to be revisited, soon.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

A loved boy

I began this post, or one very like it, with the same title, over a year ago. It sat in my list of posts as a draft for weeks on end, before I finally deleted it, for reasons I'm not at all clear about. Why resuscitate it now, especially in the light of what I wrote less than a week ago about keeping my emotional life out of my blog? The catalyst was re-reading Loving Sander yesterday - in fact, into the early hours of this morning, it was 2:15 before I finished it, so it was lucky that I was on a briefing day today and didn't have to put in an appearance until 10:00 - and the recognition of a good number of parallels between the book and my experience. In fact, Loving Sander, indirectly, at least, was the reason for my getting back into trying to write myself - not my blogs, several months earlier than that, more or less two years ago, when I went into our local supermarket and bought a notebook and a pack of pencils. What had nettled me into wanting to put my thoughts on paper was a series of customer reviews of Loving Sander on the Amazon website, from where I'd bought the book, several of which had little to do with the book itself, and much to do with 'hating the paedo', claims that the story was nothing more than child pornography (although there's almost no explicit sex in it, possibly three or four sentences in 160 pages, and very little sex of any kind - it's much like Lolita in that respect) and the like, and the review that really got my back up, which, in amongst rubbishing the book, claimed that the man in a man-boy relationship never (my emphasis) has any genuine interest in the boy, and is only out for his own ends, sexual by implication. The reason I was so annoyed by that glib generalised assertion was that I know, from personal experience, that it's not true. Because I've been in a loving, completely non-sexual relationship with a boy, which lasted several years.
I've spoken about my cousin (my first cousin once removed, to be genealogically accurate - his mother was actually my first cousin) several times in the blog, most recently a couple of weeks ago when he and his family were threatening to come down to Cornwall, a trip which didn't eventually materialise, basically for reasons of cost. I've made the point that he's my best friend, which he is. He's also the person I was in love with for three-quarters of the 1980's.
I've known him since he was a toddler - he's always lived in and around the Manchester area, and we, as a family, didn't visit out relations in that part of the world, for a couple of years either side of his being born. I kind of broke the ice by writing to my aunt and asking if I could go up and stay in the summer holidays at the end of my first year at senior school, Summer 1972. The trip was arranged, and it turned out to be the first of many for me, mostly on my own, although my parents and siblings did travel up there on occasion as well, over the next four or five years. I always got on really well with my cousin, right back to when he was 2 years old, but there was never anything more than a 'big brother/little brother' kind of relationship between us - I've said elsewhere that I became properly aware of my attraction to boys during my early teens, but my predilection was always for the pubescent (and still is, of course). Having said that, by the time he was 4 or 5, he was a noticeably good-looking boy, pretty, almost, and reasonably bright, too, able to chat away happily enough without much difficulty, within sensible bounds, probably not unconnected with the fact that his father was an electrical engineering graduate, and an intelligent, if rather self-destructive man.
Things between us went along pretty much unchanged for another few years - I saw my cousin for maybe a couple of weeks a year, we stayed firm friends, going out and about whenever I made my periodic visits, but not, in all honesty, overly important parts of each others' lives. The step change in the relationship came about when I moved to Manchester to work in 1980. In what was originally supposed to be a temporary measure, but eventually lasted nearly two years, I lodged with my aunt and uncle. Through family circumstances - his father worked on the North Sea oil rigs, was away for two or three weeks at a time, and spent most of the time he was at home drunk, sadly, while his mother, whose maternal instincts were, to be as charitable as I can to someone who isn't around to reply any longer, and who I never got on with, intermittent, was quite happy for my aunt and uncle, his grandparents, to more or less bring my cousin up - he stayed at their house at least 90% of the time, which, of course, meant that I saw him virtually every day. He was a fortnight short of his tenth birthday when I moved, and it wasn't long before I'd not only resumed the 'big brother' role I'd had for years, but was becoming something more like a surrogate father/confidante/safe haven for him. Within a matter of weeks, we had drawn very close, and with hindsight, I was starting along the road to falling in love.
The final piece in that particular jigsaw fell into place the following Spring. I'd been home to see my family and friends for two or three long weekends, but I eventually had a longer break, almost two weeks, and disappeared down to Kent. By the time I got back to Manchester, I found myself missing him a lot, which I really hadn't expected. It immediately became apparent that the feeling was mutual - I'd rung my aunt the evening before I returned, to give her a rough idea of when I'd be getting back, and, as I drove into their street and back to the house, my cousin was waiting at the gate, waving madly as soon as he saw my car (it was yellow, he could hardly miss it!), and almost literally jumping up and down with excitement. I suppose my falling for him was an ongoing process, but if there was a specific moment when I 'fell in love', that reunion was it. He had friends of his own age, and often 'played out' with them as the local dialect had it, but, to all intents and purposes, as far as school and work allowed, we were pretty much inseparable. Needless to say, there were mutterings, especially from his mother, who, I'll freely admit, I didn't like, and who didn't like me, about the amount of time we spent together, and the implications of that. It needled me more than it might have, I suppose, because, as he got towards 11, and was beginning to move from his 'little boy' years into the earliest stages of puberty, I realised that, on top of the love and care I felt towards him, he was beginning to turn me on as well. Not instead, in addition. There was one occasion in particular, when he came into the living room, and settled himself close to me on the sofa, to do some shared activity, I don't remember what, and I became almost painfully aroused by his closeness, his presence. I don't think he was aware of it - he didn't react as though he was aware, anyway - but it was a significant moment for me. I wasn't evasive enough to pretend I didn't know what it meant, and it introduced a layer of complication to our relationship from which it wouldn't be free for several years.
He was never a particularly tactile boy, hated cuddles (unlike 'B', his cousin, but that's another story from a few years later), but he would allow a certain amount of 'arm around the shoulder' level of contact, as long as I didn't push my luck. One exception, which he initiated, was sometimes when we watched TV late at night - he was a 'night owl' from an early age, and a bloody nightmare to get up in the morning! - I would sit on the sofa, while he propped himself up against the arm and laid full length across the tops of my legs. I, frankly, loved it, but it was as close to real physical intimacy as we ever got, apart from one, much later incident, which doesn't really count, because he was asleep at the time - we had to share a double bed when we went to Kent for my dad's funeral, and I was woken at some indeterminate dark hour of the night by him wrapping me up totally in arms and legs, almost as though he was trying to climb inside me, but he remembered nothing of it the following morning.
He knew, by the time he was 12, that I was sexually attracted to him - how it came out, I really can't recall, but he knew. His father was effectively an alcoholic by that stage, and I remember being horribly stricken with guilt on one occasion when he'd opened his heart to me about his problems, and said "My dad's a drunk, and my best friend fancies me". It made me feel as though I'd abused him just by my thoughts. But I never would have abused him, molested him, because he was my best friend, if for no other reason. We did talk about the issue, but he made it clear that he wasn't interested in sex with me, and, even if my attitudes weren't quite as fully developed then as now, I was still no rapist - he'd said 'no', and I accepted that. If he'd changed his mind, I'd have gone to bed with him in a heartbeat, but he didn't. Again, much later, I recall him saying "I don't know why we never went to bed together, there was just something inside that wouldn't let me." Whatever the 'something inside' was, probably just the fact that he was (is) straight, it wasn't going to happen, and never did.
There's a line in Loving Sander which really made me think of my cousin - 'Loving Sander, at 12, was like trying to hold on to a thrashing cat'. We hardly ever argued, mostly because I gave into him, almost always, but we did have our moments. One bad day, perhaps the worst, came after I'd finally moved out of my aunt and uncle's to be nearer to a new job. He was 13, or thereabouts. There was a car show at the G-Mex exhibition centre in Manchester which my cousin wanted to go to, but, typically, no-one in his immediate family was willing or able to take him. I'd volunteered, or been volunteered, and I'd made what was quite a messy and complicated journey from where I'd moved to, after I'd finished work, to find him still in bed - this was about 2:00 in the afternoon. After trying, more or less gently, to induce him to get up, for something like three-quarters of an hour, my patience with him ran out - I'd been up since 4:30 that morning, and had rushed straight from work to meet him - and I told him that if he wasn't up in 10 minutes, I was going home, and went downstairs. He appeared within two or three minutes, inarticulately angry and almost in tears, telling me that if I was going to threaten him, I could piss off and never see him again. That prospect threw me into emotional turmoil, leaving me as close to tears as he was. We found a way to work it out, and, on reflection, I could understand why he'd been so upset - I was, and had been for something like three years at that point, the only stable, reliable emotional prop in his life, the only person that was always there for him, without any equivocation. And I think, even in his teenage self-centredness, which we almost all are/were guilty of at that age, he realised, perhaps as never before, how important he was to me, too. Because there was no doubt, even then, and certainly not now with the benefit of hindsight, that he was at least as important to me as I was to him. And we made it to the car show, and enjoyed it.
Because I loved him and wanted him to be happy, I tried my best to not to allow my emotional attachment to him to get in the way of his life and individuality. The only time I really 'cramped his style' was on New Year's Eve 1985. I'd once again made a rather tortuous journey after work, fighting against a public transport network shutting down early for the holiday, to go a party he'd wanted me to be at, to see in the New Year, and, as ever, I'd always rather see him than not when the opportunity arose. The party was at the house opposite my aunt and uncle's, where he was still spending most of his time, which meant that no-one had any problems with transport home - I was staying over - so the alcohol was flowing more than somewhat. As midnight approached, he became entangled with a girl who lived locally, and who he'd been vaguely interested in for a while. Whether it was the fact that I sensed things between us were changing, his being 15 and well advanced through puberty, whether it was a fit of pique because he'd asked me to go and then I felt he'd abandoned me, or whether it was the booze - probably a combination of all three - I became insanely jealous. I didn't actually say anything to him, but we knew each other more than well enough for him to know how upset I was. He could have just ignored me and gone off with the girl, but he didn't. He gave me all sorts of grief about it afterwards, but he actually saw the New Year in with me. It says a lot about the mutuality of the relationship, I think, even at that fairly late stage in its life.
It did, in the form it had been, come to an end. The sexual attraction I felt towards him waned as he got older, because of my proclivities, and the 'Dark Place' incident with 'B' also intervened, which had the effect of driving my boyloving side deep underground for a long time. We did actually completely fall out for a while, the best part of year in his late teens when we didn't even speak - I wasn't invited to his 18th birthday party, something almost no-one who'd known us would have predicted -  but that was something I think we both needed, to both break ties that had become inappropriate, certainly for him, and maybe even for me, and to allow us, when we did restore things between us, to do so in terms of a close adult friendship, which remains to this day.
The codicil to our love, for such I really think it was, came on an empty road in the rural South Midlands, on a dark and starry night when he was 16. With apologies for my over-emotional style, I wrote about it in 'Cuckoos' a while back. (Here - http://sbcuckoos2.blogspot.com/2011/03/zenith.html?zx=f71d1f6b8d211e54). It says a lot about us, I think.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Here, away, and the bit in between

Back in my pseudo-anchorite cell in darkest Surrey, after a none-too-onerous journey up from home. Small consolation for having to be here at all, but at least I arrived on time.
There were a couple of oddities on the train - I gratuitously missed a good opportunity to write, having a fairly literate seeming 'stream of consciousness' going on in my head, which I totally failed to extract from my mind, despite having my laptop in the luggage rack just above me, and even a notebook and pencil in my main luggage, although to have unearthed those would have meant some fairly unseemly rooting amongst my clean socks and underwear. A waste, undoubtedly, even though I don't really consider myself anything close to a 'proper' writer.
A goodly part of the stuff in my head was inspired by my reading matter, as I threw caution to the wind and began re-reading Loving Sander for the third (I think) time. Reckless, given the subject matter and the effect it tends to have on me - and did. We're not talking Nifty here - it's a bona fide novel, and a love story, at that - but there were one or two passages which found their way beneath my armour, one in particular which I didn't remember as being quite so mind-manglingly erotic, especially given the veiled, almost coy language used. I glanced up to see a severe, schoolmarm-ish, 60-something lady looking my way, as though I'd drawn her disapproval by somehow broadcasting my thoughts around the carriage. Not, on reflection, the best book for me to be reading on a moderately busy train.
Mixed news for my wife today, and, indirectly, I suppose, for all of us. On the credit side, it's looking almost a done deal that my wife is going to be transferred to the new holders of the contract for her project, and, something which seemed particularly unlikely only a couple of weeks ago, still in a management position. Immediate financial meltdown, it seems, has been averted. Much less welcome, though, was more bad news about my mother-in-law's health. She's not well at all, and has had a fall, too, and is being re-admitted to the hospice she was in a few months ago for another period of respite care. One day, sooner rather than later, I fear, a phone call with worse news is going to arrive. It could be a rough summer.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B

Trying to find the answer

Predictably enough, introspection has been the order of the day, again. I'm trying to find the key, the answer to my own question. Why, beyond habit, go on? I need to find the solution, to find a way of justifying it to myself, because if I can't do that, it just isn't going to happen.
At the risk of morbidity, I'm not all that confident about my health holding up, especially if I throw psychological problems into the witches' brew - I wasn't all that good before the weekend, and I'm little better now, but how much of that is in the mind is hard to say. But again, if I don't keep going, can't keep going, what that failure would entail would almost certainly make the situation worse. Damned if I do, and damned if I don't writ large. Take a deep breath, and press on regardless, I suppose. I'm worth more dead than alive, anyway, with insurance and the potential payout from my occupational pension, so at least my family would be taken care of, to a point. Not that any of that does much for me, but there's nothing to be gained by complaining, so just don't.
The other stuff in my head - well, that, at least at the moment, is insoluble. I can't seem to live with it or without it. I'm afraid of the consequences of not being myself, in some way or another, but I'm almost as afraid of the consequences if I am. Society just isn't geared up for the likes of me, hardly surprising, really, since I'm not even geared up to deal with myself. It's an ongoing bad dream, day after day. I must find a way of waking myself. Insanity, all sorts of disasters could lie ahead if I don't.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B