Tiny child’s pain is a real big issue
COMEDIAN and author Richard Osman’s chapter for Jane Graham’s book Letter To My Younger Self – profits go to The Big Issue – dwells on the delights of his youth. He adored sport: not playing but watching. He was besotted by comedy. He thought he worshipped music, but preferred reading about it to listening to the stuff.
He enjoyed an idyllic childhood until, aged nine in 1979, he was summoned to the front room. There, his mother, grandmother and father awaited him and he was told: “Look, your dad is in love with somebody else and he’s leaving.”
Richard writes: “I just thought ‘Riiiiight, okay’. And he left and his entire side of the family never spoke to us again.”
He then he describes “going off course” because “I had to find a way to fix the pain. And everyone else’s pain, which of course I couldn’t do.” He became “overly careful about everything”. He says in those days no one discussed the issue. Two days off school were deemed sufficient recovery time.
It has taken Richard a lifetime to find the person he feels is his “real” self. By that he means the blissfully carefree nine-year-old with two parents under the same roof.
IFEAR when my daughters read his poignant words they too will be plunged back to the day when, aged 10 and 13, their father, hissing “I no longer love your mother”, strode from the house.
Their world disintegrated and we existed in what felt like a permanent wake. None of us could sleep, eat, read or think. From his family came deafening silence.
Like Richard, my girls and I feel we have been chasing our “real” selves ever since.
My fiancé Ben reminds me that when we met I said: “I wish you knew the real me. I used to be jolly and gung-ho. I changed.”
Richard Osman’s reflections should stop any parent thinking of quitting the family home dead in their tracks.
We all know the speech: “I am leaving your mother/father, not you. I love you. I’ll be seeing you every second Wednesday and every third weekend with alternate Christmases at my house.”
But to a child the suitcase in your hand signals just one thing: “My parent is leaving. My world is falling apart.”
Forget the greener grass that will soon fade to beige and if you can, stay put.