CROSSING THE NONSENSE DIVIDE

Crossing stories

The revenge of the family odd-ball

When I was about twelve years old, I won a little transistor radio in an art competition. This was about the time that my parents started teasing me that I must have been adopted, because my personality differed so much from my siblings’ personalities.

At the same time I was going through the typical pre-teen ‘nobody loves me, and everybody hates me’ phase. As you can imagine the insecurities of puberty aggravated my angst at being adopted, because obviously not even my biological parents loved me enough.

And then, one night, clandestinely listening to my radio under my bed sheets in the dark, I heard that every third child born in the world at that time was Chinese. I was dismayed and upset. I was the third child in my family and I did not want to be Chinese. At least, I did not want to be the only Chinese in my family and in our neighborhood. As a pre-teener, that was just too ‘apart from’ for my liking.

However, I managed to find a very effective way to retaliate against my significant others. Of course, it had to be suitably passive-aggressive, because I was still dependent on them and did not want to alienate them too much.

Here's how I took revenge (at least, at the time I thought that's what I was doing):  I simply did not buy flowers or cards on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.  How could I when supposedly no-one knew who or where my mother and father were.

To say the least, it took many years before I was ready to drop this particular bit of nonsense, close the divide between my parents and I, and become ‘a part of’ the annual ritual of giving thanks to parents of both sexes.

James McIntosh
 

 ►next story:  Crossing over to love, dispassionately

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