Family Values.

I once saw a male actor in tears because his grandmother had died. If it had been his dog, I would have empathised completely. But a grandparent? What’s one of those?

OK, I’m being rhetorical. This is my experience of grandparents:

As far as I know, I saw quite a lot of my paternal grandmother until my parents separated when I was five. After that, very little. She moved away from the area when I was about nine, and died when I was twelve. I have only vague memories of her.

My maternal grandmother was a little unusual. I’m told she’d been a woman of... what should we call it? Easy virtue? That sounds moralistic, which I certainly don’t mean to be. How she’d lived her life is none of my business. The fact is, however, that my mother had suffered somewhat at the hands of her own mother’s unconventional habits, and there was clearly some tension between them. Even though she lived until I was in my late twenties, I never had much to do with her.

Then there was my stepfather’s father. He came onto the scene when I was six and died four years later. In the interim, I’d seen him three or four times a year because he lived 150 miles away in London.

That’s it. Three grandparents, none of them close. All three represented no more than a theoretical concept of attachment.

And almost the same is true of the rest of my ‘family.’ My parents’ separation was messy. First my mother disappeared; then she came back and my father left. My half brother, who was much older than me and whom I idolised, chose to enter the army at the same time and never lived at home again. It wasn’t long before I stopped idolising him, and nobody falls harder than the one who’s fallen off a pedestal. My mother remarried a year later and my stepfather turned out to be a petty martinet who specialised in different forms of abuse depending on who he was dealing with. In my case it was mostly emotional, so there wasn’t a great deal of familial warmth there. What few cousins I had were kept at arms length by the strained nature of the relationship between my mother and stepfather.

I suppose that’s why I made a unilateral declaration of independence at age fourteen. I did my own thing from then on, whether my parents approved or not.

Eventually I had a daughter of my own, but circumstances took me away from her when she was at the same age as I’d been when my own parents had separated. That sort of thing raises a barrier that never fully comes down. And, just to bring this post full circle, the irony is that I became a grandfather myself at age forty two. I had no idea what a granddad was supposed to be or how he was supposed to behave. I still haven’t. More to the point, I have an abiding sense – quite wrongly, I admit – that grandparents are irrelevant anyway.

None of this is meant to evoke pity. Everybody’s life takes its own course, and everybody has to accept whatever roads they are able to walk. The only point I’m making is that I haven’t a clue what the term ‘family values’ means. I’ve always had to find my own people, and that search never ends.