I was very lucky to have a family who loved me a lot

• Mythopoesis 1 - same life story, different conclusions

My Dad’s side

My Dad

Me and my dad didn’t connect easily but we kept trying because we loved each other

1. You shared your passions with me in order to connect, because you loved me

• As I grew up, you met me the way that you could - by sharing your passions.
• “Won’t it be deeply wonderful and meaningful to share my passions with my son? My dad was so uncaring, he kicked me out at 16, he didn’t take time to try to connect with me. I’ll take my son to football games, just the two of us. We’ll go to car shows, we’ll chat about football at the pub. It’s going to be so fucking meaningful dude, I can’t wait to have a son to share all this with”
  • ![[Mythopoesis → rewriting the conclusion that I am boring, + I don’t have much to offer, + I don’t have any interests-1761493855588.webp]]
    • 👆 This, but it’s my dad thinking this thought at 40 years old in 1996

Football

I can see why football matters so much to you

• I get why you’d like it, growing up in the 1960s/70s
• Imagine being born in a working class town in the 1950s. Of course football is going to be a big part of your life, of course there’d be a lot of local pride about it, of course you’d play football with your friends etc. Makes total sense (you know, pre-internet, surrounding by the working class, your dad is literally a coal miner, etc). Religion is kind of on the way out (I mean, we’ve just survived two world wars, modernity is on the way out). No-one is religious anymore, but we all have that religious impulse, the craving to care about something bigger, and for community. Football, supporting the town’s team… you end up supporting them your entire life, sticking by them through highs and lows. I can see how that’d be very meaningful.

Sadly football just didn’t matter to me!

• I never cared about football
  • As a kid, I just… I just didn’t give a shit about football. Who knows why. Maybe by the 90s, it was less likely to capture my attention, compared to video games and Harry Potter. Maybe some kids are predisposed to loving sport because of… team spirit, loyalty, idk, and some kids are more… individualistic, averse to aligning themselves with a team, intellectual little nerds who think that supporting one team over another just because they’re the team of your town is dumb, etc. Maybe I was too much of an only child, maybe if I had some brothers we’d bond over football, who knows. Anyway, it never clicked for me.
  • I tried to care, a bit: I went to games with him, decked out my team scarf, yelling “come on you Brewers!” as instructed, having fun at being the centre of attention. But the act of watching the game - god, it’s so dull. And it’s cold, we’re stood outside, and who cares who scores, who cares which team wins, I just don’t get it. And cringing at the men in the stands who act as if they knew more than the referees, as if the players can hear their advice, as if anyone is impressed by the way they roleplay as the manager, strutting up and down, hollering, cajoling, despairing, etc.

Music

I can imagine how exciting classic rock was to live through

• Imagine you’re born in the 1950s, your parents are from the silent generation, very conformist, very downtrodden. And then rock ‘n’ roll like, begins. You find the Beatles to be too twee, clearly aiming at their teenage girl fans (every song on their first 4 albums is “You’re The Best Girlfriend Yeah Yeah Yeah”), you’re not impressed even when they get more experimental. But then comes Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and holy shit, what IS this, this is so fucking NEW, so exciting, so electric.
• And then, when you’re 45 and your son is 5, you’re like fuck yeah, time to share my music with him. And he actually genuinely does love The White Stripes, the first band you introduce him to, a band who he deeply loves, listening to all them albums on repeat for what feels like years. But the classic rock, somehow he can sense how dated it is, the lustre is gone, it’s 3 decades later, he doesn’t care, really.
• And your son, he’s not disagreeable, something in him makes it almost impossible for him to say “I don’t like this thing” (be it football, or classic cars, or classic rock). So he sings along despite a feeling of hollowness with a lot of it.

I strongly resonate with your very strong sense of musical taste

• Because you loved stuff from the 70s and were very picky with your taste, you were not interested in a lot of the stuff I shyly tried to show you, dismissing it quickly, a habit from your own father that slipped out sometimes, which is understandable, I mean, who doesn’t accidentally mirror their parents.
• E.g., I tried to show you The Voidz - “they’re doing too much, it’s complicated for no reason”, which, yeah, they are kinda mad, fair.
• Same with Kendrick Lamar, my favourite artist - I actually didn’t even bother, because that’s also a lot. No 60-something working-class boomer is going to immediately love To Pimp a Butterfly, and we didn’t have the kind of relationship that gave time for repeated listens, I can totally get how jarring and bad it’d sound
• It’s not that you didn’t keep up with music, like I said, you liked The White Stripes, the Strokes, and you kept an eye on up-and-coming artists in the local scene, if they suited your taste.

My child won’t be super excited about something from my zeitgeist and that’s ok

• It’s like me showing my son the “Kendrick vs Drake” beef. He might be vaguely interested, but to be there as it was happening, to have been steeped in a decade of Kendrick and Drake and then have that happen, hits so different
• Something here on the difficulty on sharing something that is very of-the-zeitgeist. Very hard to share the zeitgeist with younger generations, things become a period-piece, quaint, etc

I want to do something like a 50/50 split with my kid

• 99% stuff that my dad liked, 1% me. Ideal would be a more fair split, trying out each other’s stuff
• Take it in turns, earnestly try out the new stuff, stick with it. Like the Turning the Tables youtube channel, which I know is a very high bar, those two have an awesome relationship

Some of it really hit

• You put me onto The White Stripes, the first band I ever deeply loved!!
• You put me onto The Strokes, the second band I ever deeply loved!!!

I can see why cars were exciting

• Cars were just way cooler in the 1960s/1970s. And then when you were in your 40s/50s, you could buy some of these cars that you loved as a teenager, which must have felt great
• You worked hard for decades and paid yourself a low wage to make sure the business was always very safe, and to save for retirement, so you didn’t have a big flashy collection, you’d occasionally buy one old Lancia, probably each one costing less than £10,000, drive it for a few years, and always sell it after a while
• My dad loved Lancias

2. I probably never explicitly told you that I didn’t care about these things

• As a kid with poor theory of mind and a desire for attunement and also a dislike of hurting people’s feelings, I didn’t tell you that I didn’t care about these things and instead hoped that you’d notice, or I guess, thought it was obvious, and that you were powering through anyway

3. If I told you that I didn’t care about these things, you probably would have changed your approach

• If I said “I’m sorry dad, I know you love football and cars but they really just don’t do anything for me”, I don’t believe that you would have said “well I don’t care what you think, we’ll keep going to football games and car shows anyway”
• I think you would have said “ok what should we do instead”
• There was a space where we could have e.g. watched more of the things that I wanted to watch (no more Laurel and Hardy!), played video games together, etc (sorry for being such an introverted kid lol, you can’t exactly read Harry Potter together, really)
• I didn’t say that I didn’t like your stuff, and I didn’t say that I’d rather do x. I hoped you’d be an attuned mind reader. And perhaps you were pretty non-attuned. But perhaps also I was too good at faking enthusiasm! And perhaps you had a hunch that I didn’t really have like, the bug for football and cars, I imagine it would’ve been pretty obvious that I wasn’t like, super excited by this stuff. So we both could have done things differently here, but it’s ok, we were both beginners

3. It’s a real shame that none of our interests lined up!

• It’s a genuine shame, bless us both
• Oh man, I can’t wait to go to football games with my son! → he doesn’t give a shit about football
• Oh man, I can’t wait to listen to classic rock with my son! → he doesn’t like most of it
• Oh man, I can’t wait to talk to my son about cars → he doesn’t give a shit
• Just an odd quirk of the universe, and we tried anyway!
• The constant trying & not clicking shows constant care → we never threw up our hands and said “well, this clearly isn’t working, forget it!”, which is actually what my grandad said to me, in public. “He doesn’t care about sport, he doesn’t care about anything! [And by implication → I don’t value him!”]“. You didn’t do that, you kept trying, even though it must have made you feel awkward and self-conscious, and sad to not be connecting with your son.

4. Our lack of aligned interests didn’t diminish your love

• Unlike my grandad who literally said that
• You loved me regardless of our lack of shared interests, regardless of how awkward our connection was

5. It was already a shame that we didn’t have much in common and then the family got blown up

• Perhaps we could have gone to football games, listened to music, gone to the pub, and perhaps with enough time together I’d grow to be able to say “I don’t like this stuff, why don’t we do this stuff instead”, and we’d meet in the middle more
• But you and mum naively adopted a child and split up a year later, so all of these things because extra hard to care about, because you accidentally detonated a bomb and then split up and I’d only see you on the weekends, further straining our relationship.
• And now my home life is high conflict, my mum hates my sister, I’m hiding in my room, you’re no longer in the house, and then oh hey it’s the weekend, let’s spend two days together with my adopted sister too. We already didn’t have much to connect on, you already weren’t very good at meeting me where I was at, and now things have just gotten 100x more complicated
• So, it was already going to be an uphill battle, and it got much harder, lack of time, lack of connection

Remember - my kid won’t care about my zeitgeist and my passions

• Might not care at all about writing, for example
• Might not care at all about music
• Might be born in the 2030s, raised in the 2040s, wildly different from being raised in the 2000s & 2010s. Different zeitgeist, concerns, ethics. (e.g., I read the Harpers “The Goon Squad” piece today, my god)
• E.g., my dad showing me a lancia that he bought, “holy shit I loved this so much as a teenager and then I worked for decades and have been running my successful business and now I get to buy it, this is so a full circle moment for me, so much in this” and I’m a 10 year old or a 15 year old who doesn’t get cars (and also you know, not an adult who can grok the profundity of the moment) so I’m just like “oh cool yeah this is a nice car”, but it doesn’t like, light a fire in my heart or anything

My Mum’s side

My Mum

• I’m very lucky that my mum’s love was so obvious that I don’t need to write about it

My Grandma

• I was so insanely lucky to have my grandma on my mum’s side, she was so fun and she cared about me a lot. I felt very intrinsically lovable
• We’d bake together (scones, nice and easy), make gooseberry jam, paint, go on walks, I’d sleep on a mattress on her floor with ClassicFM on
• Her and my Grandad has this awesome rickety old place called Cocky Barn, big old house, great amount of land, trees to climb, vegetable patch, walks to go on, it was an insane blessing!! My nephew for example doesn’t have that now (as it was sold ~2 decades ago), which is a huge shame. So lucky to have had this place

My Grandad

• I’m lucky to have had my grandad - he was quiet and shy but he was a nice presence, this big man who loved food and beer and rugby, twinkle in his eye about all of these things.

Aunts and uncles on my mum’s side

My cousin and his parents

• Man, I was so lucky to grow up with my cousin, a boy in the same year as me (different school)
• We played in the woods, played video games, made dens, made blanket forts, watched films, I watched him play video games on his PC in his awesome bedroom, it was so so good
• Also their house was so cosy, loved all the books and DVDs on the bookshelves in their living room. They made great home-made food, pizza night and curry night and great puddings and etc, bread and butter pudding, creme fraiche. Their funny dog, going on walks, going fishing
• His parents are funny and well read and intelligent, good people

Nice aunty!

• One aunty was very similar to me (“the intellectual, sensitive one”, lol) and we got on really well. We could connect at the same level, talk about honest stuff, we wrote letters sometimes

Funny depressed uncle

• My nice aunty is married to a funny, cynical grump who I haven’t really spoken to in years, but he’s recently been added to the family group chat and he’s made me lol, he also added a really funny comment to my facebook profile pic lol

The fun aunty and uncle

• Really lucky to have had my fun aunt and uncle!! The younger ones (like, 15 years younger??). Going to Go Ape together, their agentic proactive spirit, they’re very inspiring, they’ve achieved a whole bunch and they’re both very nice