16-09-2013, 02:00
I was raised a long time ago, but here goes:
1. Male, but I sometimes wonder what might have been had circumstances been different.
2. Male, but my mother always desperately wanted a daughter. She was a very 'black and white' person with polarised attitudes, and I doubt she would have been able to handle my becoming the daughter she wanted had that shown any sign of happening. My father was killed when I was two years old and I have no surviving direct memories of him. As it was I and my younger brother got sent off to a boy's boarding school at age 7 to provide a more male oriented environment.
3. I have lived with my SO for nearly 35 years.
4. While we both agree that we sometimes need our own space, my need is greater than hers. We both like to know where the other is, and do our best to respect this need. This would apply to the circumstances you mention. I reckon though that we spend (and mostly enjoy) more time together than most couples, although we don't always work too well together on projects which one of us feels that the other is hijacking.
5. Looking back, I am astonished how much freedom my mother gave us, and indeed the quite adventurous activities which were positively encouraged. The price was keeping her very fully briefed or involved as an actual participant, as well a quite intrusive desire to obtain full details of my activities. For example, any correspondence arriving at home from an unidentified source somehow always got 'accidentally' opened, and there was to my mind far too much feedback to school principals and relatives. For example, she came with me on a rigorous and very wet bicycle tour of Wales, and later on a trip by WWII jeep to Turkey, let me sign up for a working trip on a cargo liner down the coast of West Africa to the Congo and Angola, and was supportive of an overland trip with friends to Iran, Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier area of Pakistan. My brother took his first opportunity to escape by emigrating first to Australia and then to the USA. She became increasingly possessive of me as time went by, culminating in my guiltily taking a job in Canada and demanding that she went home when she promptly followed me across the Atlantic to try to participate in my new life. To start off, I made pretty frequent visits to her in England, but these became less frequent after I married (not to any of the girls that my mother considered suitable), setting up a classic mother-in-law situation. I felt terrible that we'd both deserted her, but we had to be our own people and we did maintain frequent contact (made more difficult by hostility towards our wives), particularly as she got older.
1. Male, but I sometimes wonder what might have been had circumstances been different.
2. Male, but my mother always desperately wanted a daughter. She was a very 'black and white' person with polarised attitudes, and I doubt she would have been able to handle my becoming the daughter she wanted had that shown any sign of happening. My father was killed when I was two years old and I have no surviving direct memories of him. As it was I and my younger brother got sent off to a boy's boarding school at age 7 to provide a more male oriented environment.
3. I have lived with my SO for nearly 35 years.
4. While we both agree that we sometimes need our own space, my need is greater than hers. We both like to know where the other is, and do our best to respect this need. This would apply to the circumstances you mention. I reckon though that we spend (and mostly enjoy) more time together than most couples, although we don't always work too well together on projects which one of us feels that the other is hijacking.
5. Looking back, I am astonished how much freedom my mother gave us, and indeed the quite adventurous activities which were positively encouraged. The price was keeping her very fully briefed or involved as an actual participant, as well a quite intrusive desire to obtain full details of my activities. For example, any correspondence arriving at home from an unidentified source somehow always got 'accidentally' opened, and there was to my mind far too much feedback to school principals and relatives. For example, she came with me on a rigorous and very wet bicycle tour of Wales, and later on a trip by WWII jeep to Turkey, let me sign up for a working trip on a cargo liner down the coast of West Africa to the Congo and Angola, and was supportive of an overland trip with friends to Iran, Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier area of Pakistan. My brother took his first opportunity to escape by emigrating first to Australia and then to the USA. She became increasingly possessive of me as time went by, culminating in my guiltily taking a job in Canada and demanding that she went home when she promptly followed me across the Atlantic to try to participate in my new life. To start off, I made pretty frequent visits to her in England, but these became less frequent after I married (not to any of the girls that my mother considered suitable), setting up a classic mother-in-law situation. I felt terrible that we'd both deserted her, but we had to be our own people and we did maintain frequent contact (made more difficult by hostility towards our wives), particularly as she got older.