If I'd been a girl

Like most men, I guess, I sometimes imagine what my life would have been like if I'd been a woman. Strangely though, considering my advanced age, I've never imagined how my childhood might have changed if I'd been a girl.

Instead of being packed off to an all-male boarding school at age 13, I'd probably have gone to the same secondary day school as my sister. This might have changed my life quite a lot.

Why? Because till the age of 13 I spent a lot of time with my sister and was very close to her. We played together, did things together, hung out together. But once I was at boarding school I only saw her occasionally and we were no longer so close. I was living my life, she was living hers, and this created a distance between us.

If I'd gone to the same school as her, we'd have shared our experiences as girls - how we were treated by boys, our periods, our clothes, our crushes, how we saw our bodies and all that stuff. We'd have been together at home, doing the domestic chores, doing our homework, going out with friends, and presumably the closeness would have continued.

Unfortunately that wasn't to be and after I left boarding school, although I tried hard to restore the old closeness, it was gone. After a while we both left the parental home and again we were leading separate lives that added to that sense of distance.

Nothing has happened over the years to change that, and despite all my efforts there has only been the bare minimum of contact between us. We can't have exchanged more than a few dozen emails in several decades.

Life is what it is and I've had to come to terms with the estrangement. But my life would have been so much richer if I was still as close to my sister as I was in my early childhood.

There's a deep sense of loss that can't be shed.

Family of strangers

Sometimes I wonder what it's like to have a "normal" family. Or at least how I picture a normal family, if such a thing exists. The sort of family that's endlessly paraded in the media and TV adverts.

You know, the kind of family where they all get on with each other (more or less), where there's lots of physical affection, where they have frequent gatherings to celebrate things like Christmas and birthdays, where they defend each other to the hilt.

My family isn't remotely like that. The polar opposite in fact. It would be hard to find a family more dysfunctional, more like a bunch of strangers forced to mingle with each other than a family.

My father and I were estranged for a good twenty years. It seems I was too unconventional for his tastes, so he broke off communication. My sister and I have been estranged for even longer. I suspect she dislikes my political views but there must be more to it than that.

My brother in law and niece are equally non-communicative. We were in close touch for a few months while my mum's probate was sorted out, but then everything went quiet again.

My mum always kept in touch, but we were never that close because like my father she never understood my aberrant personality. Even my vegetarianism defeated her. To her dying day, she was sure I was really a meat-eater.

So I imagine that strange phenomenon, a normal family. A tightly-knit group of buddies rooting for each other and enjoying everyone's odd tastes and opinions.

My mental template of a normal family is the time I visited a Jewish family in Bournemouth. The interaction between them was extraordinary. They were all speaking at once, arguing passionately, sparking each other off. They plainly got on like a house on fire.

A far cry from my own peculiar family.

Estranged

It must be really hard for a parent whose child develops views they simply can't understand or sympathise with, and who gradually severs all contact and wants nothing more to do with them.

Every parent must assume a life-long bond with their child, one that grows increasingly close and rewarding, and when instead that bond disintegrates, it must be immensely painful. Even more so if the child dies.

I thought of that when I was reading about Christianne Boudreau, the Canadian woman whose son Damian became a Muslim, joined Islamic State and died in Syria at the age of 22.

How does she come to terms with what became of him? How does she cope with such a profound loss?

One thing she does is to remember him as he used to be, before his conversion, before the estrangement. "To me he was a young man who was compassionate, caring, loving and protective. That was the boy I knew. I'll always remember him as that. Not for what everyone makes him out to be."

She also supports organisations that are working with families to stop a loved one embracing fundamentalism.

But it's a common dilemma for parents. I've read of wealthy couples whose child disowns them, scornful of their affluent lifestyles and shallow values. Or stiff and starchy, penny-pinching couples shunned by a child who prefers a more spontaneous, freewheeling way of life. Or a new step-parent rejected by a child who's loyal to their original parent and sees the newcomer as an unworthy chancer.

Once a gulf like that develops, it's very hard to bridge it again. Too often, both sides become set in their ways and the stand-off continues indefinitely. They say blood is thicker than water, but that's nonsense. Families can break as easily as friendships. And the fracture can cause unbelievable pain.

Pic: Christianne Boudreau

Stranded alien

So Helen feels she's in the wrong time, place, century and country. I think a lot of us feel like that. I certainly do. I sometimes feel so profoundly estranged from this dysfunctional world, I think I must be an alien from the Planet Zog who's landed here by mistake.

I was probably just nipping down to the shops in Zog City for some more nectar, as you do, and I drove down the wrong street, as you do, and found myself swept into another dimension and heading straight for Planet Earth.

My arrival was doubtless so traumatic that I've totally repressed the memory, but I expect my reactions were something like this:

"Holy Zog, what the fuck's with this place? Are they all insane or what? Nothing but wars, poverty, brutality, pollution, slums, and half of them drugged to the eyeballs. Don't they know how to live sensibly? Don't they know how to help each other? These people are mad."

And now I can't get back to Planet Zog because I can't remember where I parked the car and my mobile phone's not working and I've forgotten how to fly through space. So it looks like I'm stuck here for a while, enduring the dismal weather and the dismal headlines.

There's one thing that really puzzles me. What's this stuff called money? And what's profit? Whatever it is, it only seems to screw people up. These earthlings are just doing everything wrong. Pea-sized brains, I guess.