Being an Orphan with Parents.

I suppose it could be said that I had an effectively parentless upbringing. My stepfather provided for the material needs, but he was no sort of a father figure in any deeper sense. My mother was a good person and a good mother in many ways, and I don’t wish to detract from her virtues, but she also had a pathological need to conform. All through my childhood I was constantly told ‘don’t do this, or people won’t like you,’ ‘don’t wear that, or people will stare at you,’ ‘take an apprenticeship when you leave school, so you’ll always have a steady job,’ and the over-arching theme was always ‘don’t take risks.’ No doubt it’s why I was more or less emotionally independent of my parents by the time I reached my early teens. The need to rebel against my stepfather’s cold, sociopathic nature and my mother’s conformist one gathered pace until things came to a head when I was nineteen and I left home for good.

What interests me, though, is this. How much of my rebellion stemmed from the feeling that I was a square peg being forced through a round hole, and how much from an inherent tendency to be rebellious? I occasionally wonder – pointlessly, of course – how different things might have been had I been brought up by a couple of far out Bohemians. Would I still have rebelled and become an arch conformist? Would I now be living in a detached house with five bedrooms and a Jacuzzi? Would I be changing my car for a new one every two years and taking frequent long holidays in far-flung (though always touristy) parts of the world? More to the point, would I be happier? What a silly question!

But it does make me wonder just how much influence the parenting style, as well as the relationship between parent and child, has on a person’s future life. Is it a major factor, or do people eventually find their own road irrespective of the stumbling blocks which even good parents can unwittingly put in their way?