boy

When I was a small boy in Warrnambool my father called me Buster and my sister Lulu. It was his only contribution to our early childhoods. To my mother were just plain Leigh and Lynne. There were no terms of endearment and no one told us we were loved. I would not have wanted that.

Recently my sister says she thinks our family was dysfunctional: that’s wishful thinking, an excuse for her own dysfunctional family. Dysfunctional didn’t exist back then. Our growing up lacked physical affection, but that seemed normal enough to me in the pre-TV 1950s. Lovey-dovey US sitcom families shamed us later in life.

I had no sense of family as a boy. I had a mother and a father and a sister. I ran about and played in the sun, happy as a sandboy, a favourite expression of my father. He and an older brother had a Warrnambool accountancy practice. When the partnership foundered, he worked in Melbourne for his father during the week and made the long drive home down the Princes Highway each Friday night.

My mother tells me that she was effectively a single parent when my sister and I were little. My father was either working or drinking, honing his snooker skills at the Warrnambool Club until early morning. It was an unhappy time for my parents but I knew none of that.

My good woman is a strongly-focused single parent. That I had brought my children up alone for 16 years was attractive to her when we started going out. She knew I would understand that our relationship came second.

I am like my mother, my sister like my father. My daughter is like me, my son like his mother. After meeting my daughter for the first time my good woman says she is my masterpiece. I agree that she’s an amazing young woman, but can take only partial credit. My son is a lovely young man.

My good woman often asks how I dealt with certain situations when bringing up my children but the details are a blur to me now. I gave them physical affection and they knew they were loved. Our little family was unconventional in many ways, and not easy for any of us, but never dysfunctional.

I’m happy with the results.

Rock on.