The Rebel Aunt

I have been lucky enough to see Henry Rollins performing his spoken word shows two different years in London. The first time I sat in the third row in the Barbican and felt like I was just a handshake away from this powerhouse of a man. It was so good I didn’t want to blink so as not to miss out on even a split second of it.

He mentioned his difficult relationship with his father. They were each other’s polar opposites, more or less, his father was a horrible chauvinist apparently and Rollins (which isn’t his family name) has been no contact with him for a long time.

At one point he said (paraphrasing, because it’s over 10 years ago): ‘People say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Except sometimes it falls into a catapult and is shot a mile away.’ My heart grew seven times its size.

This week, or maybe next, it will be 15 years since I last saw my mother in person. It's funny, but I don't know the exact date. It seems like the last time your saw your parent should be something you remember, but I didn't know then that it would be the last. I just knew I had to get out.

The last time I saw her, she was sitting on her sofa, crying crocodile tears, pushing guilt as a parting gift into my unwilling hands. I didn't slam any doors, I didn't raise my voice, I left very softly, and when I stood outside her building, I texted her eldest daughter to tell her she might want to call her mother because I was cutting my visit from abroad very short and she was having a hard time with it.

It was bitingly cold outside. There was snow on the ground, but there was even more slush and I worried about invisible ice as I slowly made my way to the train station. A friend had agreed to take me in for a couple of days before I was supposed to go to my boyfriend's parents for Christmas. I haven't been back to the town where I spent all my teens since. I don't know whether she still lives there. I don't think she does.

I didn't leave thinking that it was final. All I was thinking was, 'I don't need to take this. I don't need to sit here and listen to you belittle me in every possible way--how my existence is pointless if I don't have children, how everyone you know is better than me in countless ways, how what matters to me is utterly ridiculous and doesn't matter to anyone else anywhere. I am done shredding myself to ribbons trying to please you. I've got nothing left to give other than to start consuming my very life force and I refuse. Fuck you.'

I was beyond exhausted and I didn't need to take it anymore. If I didn't put an end to it, it would go on until I was dust and beyond.

Years later, it would occur to me that in all that time I had tried so hard to be the dutiful daughter, there were some things I had never once heard from either of my parents.

Please. Thank you. I'm sorry.

Not to mention 'I love you'.

My toes were freezing in my boots as I stood out there. Everything was freezing. And yet I texted her daughter so she could support her. Doesn't it just make you laugh? I texted her daughter. So she wouldn't be alone. None of them checked on me in the days that followed. Or, if they did, I don't remember, as both my parents liked to say. I don't remember, I don't remember, I don't remember.

I spent the next two shell-shocked days at my friend's flat far away from there, then joined my boyfriend for Christmas and New Year at his childhood home. His family all knew I had a terrible relationship with my parents. They never met, of course. Because I came from a family of bigots, and my boyfriend came from a family of foreigners.

My mother hoped the relationship would fail and I would find myself a nice bigot like herself, preferably someone that would elevate her social status somehow (her status, mind you--not mine). After all, what good is a master's degree if you're not even going to translate it into a lucrative and prestigious marriage? Again I proved to the world what a failure I was by only using it to get a job.

We had a nice Christmas and New Year. My boyfriend's parents' home was warm and welcoming and cosy. I was too exhausted to worry about everything that would come later. How lucky I was to have him and his family at such a time!

A few months later, on my 30th birthday, I got a text from an unknown number. 'I remember being in hospital with you' and blah blah blah, honestly, I don't really remember what it said, only that it was infused with guilt. I was in Nice, France, for a birthday holiday. I took the bus up to Éze and spent the day in the quiet streets and gardens there. The sun was so warm and life-giving. The text remained unanswered.

Here is my first piece of advice to anyone who has been ostracised by their family or has had to go no-contact with them:

Tend. Your. Friendships.

Making and having friends is easy when you're in school or at uni, but it gets harder and harder as you all get older, you maybe move around, and work and other obligations start to take up more of your time and energy. Outside of the workplace, we lose a lot of the socialising spaces we once had, and even in the workplace people leave all the time so that you have to start over and over with new colleagues. It can be exhausting.

Make an effort to keep your old friends and the friends you do make along the way--and I do mean effort. This stuff does not happen by itself, and that's something that took me a good long while to fully understand.

Anything important and valuable takes work, and friendships are no exception.

As with any other work, you can work harder, or you can work smarter--and if you want to work smarter, use a diary to write everything down.

Birthdays are the obvious place to start, but also make a note of any upcoming life events they might have (are they moving? changing jobs? going on holiday?). Put reminders for yourself to check in with them.

You are not a bad friend for writing this down, you are a human with many things to juggle, and this shows that they are a priority. You are bothering to make all these notes of their important days and making sure you don't go too long without meeting up. What else is a diary even for?

On that note, do make sure to meet up. Or call, if you live far from each other or other circumstances are preventing you. Personally, I send a lot of post to the friends who live far away. It's dead retro, but I like it; I make the cards myself and send them by snail mail, and my friends enjoy getting them. We text message as well, but there is something so personal about post. Here is a thing that was in my hands, and now it is in yours. Here is my handwriting, so different from text messages all in the same font as everyone else's.

Friendships take a lot of reinforcement. A lot of little touch points over time. So make time for them, do not let things fizzle out. They easily will in the beginning, if we don't make a point of getting in touch in some small way.

You want your friendships to last so you can grow together and build a history. Years down the line, you will appreciate having people who will have known you through different life stages. That is an intimacy that is quite unparalleled, and this is something we lose when we lose our families of origin. You might feel like your entire history has been wiped out because you've lost those witnesses to your life.

The blow is real. Community is extremely important for our health and well-being, and being cast out by your nearest family can feel incredibly dangerous.

When we lose our safety net like that, we have to knit a new one ourselves. So we make a new community. We find people we can connect with, people who also want to put in the work, and we build a tribe from the ground up by doing the work.

In time, you will find yourself with a wonderful and unique collection of people you can cry and laugh with, who will celebrate with you, who will include you in their celebrations, who will support you and make you feel needed, grounded and seen.

And safe.

The name of this blog was inspired by the book “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle” by Rosjke Hasseldine. When the book was recommended to me earlier this year, I devoured it in a few days, completely covering it in notes, underlines and questions.

It was in many ways a very validating book, but among the author’s case studies, there was no one I could fully relate to. By the end of the book, all the women from the examples found some kind of common ground with their mothers or had some level of communication. Only one ended up having to remove herself from her controlling family in order to be able to live her life. However, her story ends there. We don’t get to see how it went afterward.

The author calls people like her — and me — Rebel Aunts. She says they are women who can be useful to us as we work through our family dysfunction, but then she doesn’t give additional info about them. How do they fare in life? What advice would she give for their healing? How can they thrive after all this loss and being ostracised? The book doesn’t offer any advice or strategies for the Rebel Aunt. It’s almost as if we don’t need it, but we do.

Getting out doesn’t magically solve our problems and undo the harm. If anything, it is an extra challenge that we are facing it all alone. We have to figure it all out by ourselves, protect ourselves, process it all somehow. If we were never properly parented, then there is a deep wound we have to try to live around.

I have sometimes been told that I am ‘strong’ because I refused to live by others’ designs, but I had no choice. It was simply survival. I would have suffocated in my parents’ hyper-conservative regime and I clawed my way out like any drowning person would have. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t deeply hurt, traumatised, exhausted and overloaded on anxiety and adrenaline. It just means that I had to face it all alone.

I didn’t have a Rebel Aunt or a Rebel Uncle in my family who could have offered some solace or support. If I had had one, it could have made a world of difference. That is why I have started this blog. I am 44 years old now, I have gained some distance and perspective since my break with my family — which happened over the course of over 10 years starting when I was 17. My 20s were hard and traumatic. My 30s were full of upheaval. Now, I am no longer in fight-or-flight, I am healing and I may have one or two pieces of advice for anyone else out there going through that same struggle without a Rebel Aunt or Uncle of their own.

I hope to offer some optimism and share some knowledge. Leave this online like a message in a bottle for whoever might need it in the future. I am also on the lookout for other Rebel Aunts and Uncles and would love to see what I might learn from them. Like I said, I am healing, I am not healed — it is a work in progress.

My first boyfriend when I was a teenager was a foreigner. And I had known that this would not go over well with my parents.

For context, everyone in this story is white and European. He was around six months older than me, so there was no weird age gap. He neither smoked nor drank or anything else, he was just a perfectly average boy, and my parents decided he was no good without ever meeting him. Because he was foreign.

When I finally plucked up the courage to broach the subject with them, thinking I was being vague (‘What would you say if I told you I had a foreign boyfriend?’), my father promptly told me that I would be dead to him and turned his back to me to look out the window.

My mother, who sat on the sofa, didn’t bother saying anything. Or looking up from her crocheting.

I slinked away and cried my eyes out in my room that day. I felt that I had just lost both my parents. I was 17, still in school, didn’t have a job because school was hard enough, and I knew that I would be so screwed if they kicked me out. They could derail my education and absolutely destroy my future if it meant I wouldn’t be able to go to uni. I still had two more years of school left. So I sat there alone in my room and decided that I would keep my head down for those two years just to secure my graduation and then gain my freedom at uni.

A few years later, I tried to explain this whole story to some new friends I had met in a student club. I thought that being my age, they would be more understanding than my parents — after all, we were constantly being told that people from That Generation were Like That and we shouldn’t expect anything better of them. But a guy sitting at our table shook his head and said, ‘I can’t imagine choosing a girlfriend over my parents.’ The others murmured their consent.

Another door slammed in my face.

What I couldn’t articulate then but realised much later was that it had never been a choice between my parents and my boyfriend. It was always a choice between my parents and ME. I lost them because I wouldn’t lose myself.