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Tuesday, March 28, 2006 14:23
Black sheep No, not the brewery!In my last post I referred to myself as the "black sheep of the family", with the qualifier that perhaps "purple sheep" would be more descriptive. There's a reason for this, which was rammed home to me last night. Mater and Pater Ravenbait have been off in Norway for a week, leaving me to look after the house and make sure my brother stayed up to date with his laundry. It has been lonely, this past week, because I'm not used to being on my own and my brother has a rampant and vibrant social life that sees him off out most evenings. While I longed for personal space chez RF Devon, this was almost too far in the other direction. I have certainly missed Frood. I know this because I visited a large landfill site last week and could not concentrate on what the site operator was saying because I was terminally distracted by the scent of his aftershave. Anyway, they returned on Sunday, and last night I came in from work to the usual shotgun-spray of questions about what I had been doing and whether I'd had a good day at work. This was immediately followed by Pater Ravenbait fixing me with a steely gaze and saying: "I hear farmers now need a licence to take water from their land." This is true. Down in the south - everywhere else in the UK, in fact - they've been using the Water Resources Act for donkey's, and control water abstractions. Up here in the frozen North they've been using COPA, which doesn't have anything to say about abstractions. I returned my father's gaze, levelly, and said: "That's right. With the Water Framework Directive we're finally catching up with everyone else." Thus ensued a short but to-the-point discussion about the rights and wrongs of requiring people to have a licence to abstract water from 'their' land. This finished with Ravenbait Sr saying: "It's just that we know some farmers, that's all." "Yes, dad, and so do I." "Scottish ones." And that pissed me off. Because I know the same damn farmers that my parents do, what with them being family friends. Every so often my parents come out with something that seems to suggest that spending half my life down south has put me outside the family in some ways. This has happened for years - visit their house and you will find the halls bedecked with photos of my brother but hardly a one of me. Their keepsakes for me live in a box somewhere, where my mum keeps all the things that prove her daughter's weird. How weird she still doesn't know. Which is why I had to bite my tongue when my mum told me I was talking rubbish after I mentioned being the black sheep of the family the other day. Because they might not consciously think that but the clues are there. I don't mind. Not any more. I used to, back when I hadn't been away from home for all that long - only a few years - and came back one time and was shocked to find all these photos of my brother racing cars and, at the time, not a single one of me anywhere. It was like I'd been deleted from the public face of the family. I actually said something then, was really cut up about it. When I next visited there was a graduation photo. Last night I came >this< close to saying: "Look, your daughter's a tree-hugging, pinko, liberal, bisexual environmentalist whose opinions are as different from yours as they can be. Deal with it." But I didn't. I decided to save that up for a time when I need to draw that final line. The reason I describe myself as the black sheep isn't because I think I'm horrible - or even anything to do with Raven - it's because I am as different in my thoughts and attitudes as I could be and I don't understand how. How is it that my somewhat racist, homophobic, petrolhead, conservative parents have a son who's a chip off the old block in many respects, and yet managed to produce a bisexual, liberal, polyamorous, animist, environmentalist daughter? And the Old Man laughs at this, because as far as he's concerned I wasn't raised by my parents, I was raised by Family, and Family had a whole set of preset values and attitudes to work with because they were put in place before I was even born. That's a creation myth. That's my creation myth. It doesn't explain anything. It's empirical, not logical. It's a comfort, something to fall back on when I don't want to think about it any more. I'm like this because that's the way my Old Man made me, and, good Gimp that I am, in my gut that's enough. But it doesn't actually make dealing with the occasionally alien and incomprehensible thoughts and opinions of my parents any easier. I am overwhelmingly grateful to them for giving me somewhere to live while I get myself sorted out and we sell the house in Devon. But I'm not 5 years old. I'm 33. I'm all grown up now, and I'm happy and comfortable being the odd one out. I keep saying: there is no good or evil, just a difference of opinion. Put aside the more restrictive definitions of 'black sheep', the ones that include 'undesirable'. I'm not saying that my parents don't love me, or would disown me - even if I do now have three tattoos. I'm just saying that I'm not the same as them in so many different ways I can't begin to count them. Which is odd, given that I'm just like my Mum, only concentrated. I can almost see, in me, the demarcation between nature and nurture. I can see the same personality traits, the genetic inheritance, the attributes I get from both parents; and I can also see how those attributes, talents and abilities have been channeled in a totally different way. The Old Man is pretty damn smug about that as well. "As smug as a banana," as Ben would say. No, I don't understand what that means either. (1) comments | links to this post
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