You might sympathise with my parents in this situation. If they ended up having a son who allegedly ‘slept around irresponsibly and groped women’, it must be hard for them to accept that he must face his just deserts. If their son had done such things, and if the retribution were just. The accusations are not true, and the retributions are unjust, but I want to say something else. I feel sorry for my parents. I think my parents are victims in this. My family has been attacked and divided by this online hate group. These groups do not care for my parents. I hope that much is clear. They have intentionally attacked and hurt my mother to destroy the relationship with her son. Alienating him because who else will defend him when his own mother is against him. If people are so ready to lean on the myths of motherhood, they should at least ask what has turned a mother against ‘nature’. In truth though, reason only turns to myth out of convenience.
How has the activist group attacked my mother? First, the son she knew never came back from Berlin. Second, the group informed my mother of what I had said about her in a therapy session. They made her feel like she was being attacked, and then they offered my mother a more appealing story to tell about herself. A story about me that they could help other women get behind, if she were to join the campaign and read from the same script. That is, they would ensure that everyone was telling a different story about my mum than what they had supposedly been hearing from me in my counselling sessions. Friends and family ought to have protested that these people should not be coming to her with things that I had said in my counselling session. They should have pointed out that the only people spreading unpleasant stories about her was this group who were unlawfully sharing the confidences of my counselling sessions. They were weaponizing these confidences against my family. Friends of my family ought to have said that I was no to blame for any rumours that might be being spread.
When I returned to the village for the Covid lockdown, I told my mother that I had suffered harassment, and I had been abused. This was not the first time I tried to warn my parents that something was up. In the fall of 2018, I told my mum on the phone that I needed to get out of Berlin. For the first time I could not come back at Christmas and work with my dad. No sooner than I got into the car at Glasgow International Airport, I was told that I was working the next day. I would work three twelve-hour shifts with my dad and on Boxing Day we travelled one hour to Perth for Christmas shopping. My Dad always had a wad of cash that I should use to buy presents that everyone would know I had not bought. On Christmas day I overheard, “Don’t bother about him, if he’s not saying a word. He went all the way to Perth with your dad yesterday and didn’t say a word to him. He’s hardly said a word while he’s been working with your dad either. Just ignore him”. The idea that she would ignore such a blatant call for help does not match the idea that many a wives and mothers have of sacrificing themselves for the family.
I have heard her say to men at her work, presumably implicating me and my father, just as poignantly as she had said to me, “Well, it’s good to know I can do something right”. As long as I was a happy go lucky son making his way in the world, my family were happy to help me financially. They paid for my rent in Glasgow while I worked towards my hours degree and they paid the €700 a year for post-graduate tuition fees in Berlin. I had been lucky in life up to this point and, if anything, I was a bit spoiled. Nonetheless, it seemed now, as things were not going well, my awkward problems were actively ignored.
My parents had next to nothing growing up and they wanted me to have what they went without. What they had been ashamed not to have. My mother’s father was an alcoholic who worked away from home. He was the chief electrician constructing hydro damns in the glens. Before being sequestered in the cold highlands he hardly drank a drop. He was a generous man at heart. There were months when he would make it home for the weekend and spend it in the pub playing the box accordion and buying the whole bar rounds of drink. He was the best paid man in the village, but his family hardly seen a penny. My mum and uncle would sneak into his suit pockets while he was out for the count on the couch. They won chocolate for getting the money to buy the messages. My mum would watch TV round at a neighbour’s, where they once told her, ‘Your dad does not know how lucky he is to have you”. According to my aunt, this always meant a lot to my mother.
Arriving for Covid lockdowns I knew I would have to say more than, ‘I need to get out of Berlin but I cannot work’. I told them I had been abused and that she does not want to know what ‘they’ had done to me. My mum did not take this in at all. She was struggling with anxiety herself. To put this in context, family and friends had asked her to seek help for anxiety for years. My mum’s mother died in 2015 and my mother’s health suffered and she lost weight. My mum’s closest friend was diagnosed with cancer my mum did her best to be there for Maggie until she passed away in 2018. Her anxiety had always expressed itself with cleaning and the 2000 pandemic would exacerbate this.
By the time I came back for the first lock down my mum’s anxiety was through the roof. She could not handle me being distant and keeping to my room, but she was threatening to leave my dad, snapping at him over nothing, and using me to make him jealous. I wanted to keep out the away. Eventually she started snapping at me and making nasty remarks as I came in from cycling, or she would follow me up into my room. For the first time I sided with my dad and tried to hint to my mum that that we should maybe give him a break.
My mother and father met at one of the ceilidhs between villages. My father was a teenager and the youngest of five boys who grew up without a father. It was a tough life for them, but they boasted of it at times. My Grandad called them out on their ‘oh-how-poor-were-we’ craic by going one better:
“Aye, but we were so poor… when we had a rasher of bacon, we’d have to tie it to a piece of string so we could all have it”.
My mum met my Dad when he was a boy and she kept him that way. People say my dad does not know how luck he is. He knows it. Only he is to scared to admit it. In another sense, my dad is kept totally dependent on my mum who likes to hear how lucky he is. It’s not just the bills, book work, and pensions he gets help with. He hasn’t the confidence to call in a takeaway order on the way home from work, making him dependant on my mother in ways that others might have helped him overcome.
Despite having the bark of Cerberus about him, my dad is vulnerable. In primary school he was told to sit up the back because he was too stupid to be there. He only barks when he feels that people might ‘realise’ that something is wrong with him. He sometimes barks at my mother, “Of course…” or “Don’t be so bloody stupid…”. My mother said I shouldn’t speak to Dad about the way he sometimes speaks to her. Eventually, I did because I felt my dad was making a fool of himself while mum was quite happy for people to see it. Unfortunately, my dad just froze.
For the second lockdown I moved into a house on the Main Street, and I expected things to be better, but my mum would turn up at my door crying, looking very drawn. She was ill for many reasons but the breakdown in our relationship was on of them. However, I needed to draw some boundaries when I was caught in the middle of a co-dependant relationship. I later asked her not to come round to my house for a while, but she did the next day. I asked her not to text for a couple of weeks, but she did. I asked her to leave me alone for a month but the next day she sat herself beside outside a coffeeshop. Despite this, she claimed that dad and I were fighting for her attention. This was probably with the encouragement of her girlfriends in the village who know that cliche better than they know what had been happening in our home.
Everything I said seemed to make the situation worse. I decided to ask my sister, 5 years my senior, to help. She had asked my mum to seek help with her anxiety years ago. I knew there was a risk of my sister betraying me. I had been told how she would gang up on my mum with her dad, and that she reports everything to dad, and my sister always felt under my shadow. She did betray me and as a result my mum swung cynically back to Dad, and he found himself in favour again. I should have been able to rely on my dad’s support, but he is proud and pretends nothing has happened.
He was humiliated when he discovered his wife had turned him against his son. He was oblivious to this, while I was asking mum to be more forgiving towards him, to give him a break. His wife was threatening to leave him and he was too scared to challenge anything. After I started to speak to mum on his behalf, she changed sides and turned against me. I had defended him and asked to bring someone else from the family in to mediate. She predicted that people would see a side to her that she had kept hidden. While my Dad was being goaded like a child into opposing my presence in the house, I was trying to defend him. In fact he denied that mum threatened to leave him, he denied that she turned him against me, and he denied that she suddenly changed her tune and turned against me instead. My mum then became bouncy and girly around him, running after him with cake and tea. Referring to him as ‘Dad’ when she boasts that ‘Look where dad is taking me!’ pointing to a hotel brochure. As if making me jealous, like I was her brother.
Dad craned his neck round when my mother answered, with some pride, that, yes, she might have turned us to against each other. He had been treated like an idiot, while I had always understood what was going on. However, to this day my dad points and screams at us, that my mother did not threaten to leave him, nor use me to antagonise him. When my mum corrects him, my dad freezes with his arm outstretched still pointing out into the middle of the room. He stares into the floor with a distorted face. He remains in that position for a while as my mum and I argue about the details. Eventually my mum turns to shout at him repeatedly to put his arm down, and then she resorts to shouting his name to try and snap him out of it. Things should never have got this far. My family should have listened to me when I asked for help. My Dad will not back me up, after I defended him. He denies it all, now that my mum has swung like a pendulum to his side, he is grateful to be daddy again.
It seems people think I turned against my mother as a form of displaced aggression because what I had suffered at the hands of other women in Berlin. The group claims that I am suffering from painful cognitive dissonance because I am being told I am not the great guy I thought, and now I am lashing out at people like my mum. This makes our private family matters into a matter for a network of political activists. This is an extreme abuse of the feminist catchphrase ‘the private is the political’. The group has used my private counselling sessions to attack my family, divide us and isolate me to face their violent political network alone.