Well this is my story; ill begin on a Friday night at about 11 o clock I think I was about 12 at the time. We were lying in bed slagging each other , me and Steo in the bunk beds and Keith in the single bed caused he was the oldest and referred to himself as the King. Keith and Steo were very strong characters when I was quiet and introvert but only used this behaviour at home. I had an inferiority complex towards my brothers as I struggled to cope with emotions and how to express myself. I grew up very confused and consumed with fear. My sister Jenny had the Box room as she was the only girl and the youngest and the apple of my Dads eye, we would stay awake every night till my Dad got home as he drove home drunk every night from the Pub. My Mom would be in her room waiting as she could never sleep till he got home safe; this was the norm at home.
All of a sudden we heard a crash and then a car horn that stayed on for about 5 mins, Keith turned to me and Steo and said” that’s me Dad”! We jumped up and looked out the back window but couldn’t see anything. Suddenly a knock on the door two frantic owlones in housecoats saying” Harry is after driving under Danny’s coal lorry”, we ran down the stairs in our super heroes pj,s and ran around the corner with the mother leading the way screaming that dopey baldy drunken basterd making a show of me on the road, we got around to the scene to see the arse of a Toyota corolla sticking out of a coal lorry, got very worried me Dad was dead as it was totally destroyed under the lorry. We were shocked to find he wasn’t in it? Keith says” were the f..k is he “? A swift clatter from Chrissie saying “watch your language ye little bollix.” (double standards were the norm in Dublin, as long as you were the adult it was allowed) !!
The whole road was out eyeballing and little Markey said “he’s in Freddie Kelletts “so we proceeded to Freddy’s ,knocked on the door and there he was with a bandage wrapped around his head as lorry clipped his forehead, drinking whiskey and dancing like nothing happened ,now as drunk as he was he was clever enough to know not to call an ambulance the incident would have been reported as he could of been arrested for drunk and dangerous driving ,instead he went out onto the road and kindly said to the nosey neighbours can you’se all f..k of please and don’t call the police, then we carried him home to the usual “I just call to say I love you” by Stevie wonder. A song he sang when he would walk home from the local everyone in the estate heard him.
Next day the local travellers who Harry sells his scrap copper too, pulled the car out and burned it in the field while my Dad reported it stolen, couple of weeks later he had a new liteace van out of the insurance and became a local legend. I had friends write “We love Harry May “in lipstick on the blackboard in school. To be honest I don’t know how he’s still alive as he crashed more time in cars that I can only think God had a plan for him. One day in school sitting beside my friend Jay he turned and said” Your Dad crashed into the back of the bus last night” and as cringing as that was he then said “Then he got on the bus” I couldn’t help but laugh! As much as people loved his antics and he was a big character nobody seen or lived the fear we lived in at home waiting for this illness to take his life or someone else’s and the snowball effect it had on us growing up.
Reflection
Looking back on this I see that as a child I lived in fear of something terrible was going to happen and suffered with sever anxiety from an early age. The dynamics of the house revolved around alcohol and became the normal behaviour for me and my brothers. My Dad was a very witty man and when asked how he survived such a horrific crash where only as he fell asleep behind the wheel and dropped his head he would have been decapitated. He said “I dropped 50 pence”. But deep down my Dad suffered with depression but I believe he never matured emotionally as growing up in Ireland in his era emotions where repressed and looked upon as weak. My granddad was a very tough man physically and emotionally so I think my dad carried it onto us, as it’s all he knew. My family was ravaged by addiction from uncles to cousins all had substance abuse dependencies.
John Bradshaw wrote a great book called Home Coming he writes that when a child’s development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially feelings of hurt and anger a person grows up to be an adult with a hurt person inside them. He refers it to a wounded inner child. I think my Dad was a child emotionally and couldn’t express what we needed growing up so I took on these characteristics, which was so detrimental to my development emotionally. I carried these into my adult relationships and couldn’t seem to have any successful relationships with women, so ye mask it as been one of the lads and always be in short term relationships due to this. In Dublin you were the man if you could bed a lot of women, not that I was any Brad Pitt but I got my fair share but never made me feel good about myself.
Bradshaw says children need security and healthy modelling of emotions in order to understand their own inner signals. They also need help in separating their thoughts from their feelings. When the family environment is filled with violence (physical or emotional), the child must focus solely on the outside. This made so much sense to me as I escaped any way I could and my thinking became much distorted and would seek out ways of pleasure to escape my reality. Which in turn led to drink and drug addiction?
“Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstance.”
Karl Abraham