I've been waking up every half hour or so, or maybe not sleeping at all. Just drifting. Thinking, for some reason, of all the friends I've lost, one way or another. I suppose sometimes one just has nights like that. I can't say what brought it on.
I never wrote anything about visiting my parents so I thought I'd try that now, at least a bit.
It wasn't bad. If anything, it went better than I expected. They liked Mycroft, said he was a very polite and well brought up young man. They liked Lestrade. My mother said he seemed very steady and would be a good influence on me.
They were less certain about Sherlock, but they don't like a lot of noise and chaos, and Sherlock is 50% noise and 50% chaos - in the best way, of course, but they weren't seeing that. And I think Sherlock was predisposed not to be overly fond of them because he knew I was reluctant to see them. That's my fault, and I wish I could've done something differently there.
They're good people. I'm not even sure I can explain why I find it so difficult to be around them. It's...a restrained atmosphere. And I know I'm not a champion discusser of feelings, but there's a difference between not saying things and feeling you can't say them. I remember that feeling so strongly, starting with my very first memories, the undercurrent of belief that if anyone said what they were actually thinking that our world would collapse. And it was never anything that horrible, but lacking the ability to acknowledge it made every tiny thing loom over us.
Well. This is accomplishing nothing. I'm going back to bed, either to sleep or talk to L if sleep fails. Good night. Almost good morning.
I never wrote anything about visiting my parents so I thought I'd try that now, at least a bit.
It wasn't bad. If anything, it went better than I expected. They liked Mycroft, said he was a very polite and well brought up young man. They liked Lestrade. My mother said he seemed very steady and would be a good influence on me.
They were less certain about Sherlock, but they don't like a lot of noise and chaos, and Sherlock is 50% noise and 50% chaos - in the best way, of course, but they weren't seeing that. And I think Sherlock was predisposed not to be overly fond of them because he knew I was reluctant to see them. That's my fault, and I wish I could've done something differently there.
They're good people. I'm not even sure I can explain why I find it so difficult to be around them. It's...a restrained atmosphere. And I know I'm not a champion discusser of feelings, but there's a difference between not saying things and feeling you can't say them. I remember that feeling so strongly, starting with my very first memories, the undercurrent of belief that if anyone said what they were actually thinking that our world would collapse. And it was never anything that horrible, but lacking the ability to acknowledge it made every tiny thing loom over us.
Well. This is accomplishing nothing. I'm going back to bed, either to sleep or talk to L if sleep fails. Good night. Almost good morning.
69 comments:
I hope you got some sleep when you went back to bed John :-)
Things going better than you expected with your parents is good I guess but still sounds like a tough experience for you so I'm glad you had lestrade and the boys with you :-)
Families are funny things and the things you are taught in childhood are very difficult to unlearn but you are doing a great job of trying John and hopefully as your family, you lestrade and the boys, matures and develops you will find it easier to work through it all and move past the 'bad' bits so you can recognise the 'good' bits more easily :-)
Good luck with a day of entertaining Sherlock and mycroft after not much sleep. These school holiday things are hard work aren't they? :-)
Anonybob
He did, after we had a bit if a talk.
I'm glad :-) its good to talk :-)
Enjoy your day.
I'm glad that you both talked to L and got back to sleep Doc.
They liked Lestrade. My mother said he seemed very steady and would be a good influence on me. Is this the same Lestrade we know, or is this a different one from the one who's encouraging you to bounce on an inflatable Stonehenge?
I can understand your reluctance to be with your parents - there's a lot I don't tell my mother, because she wouldn't understand - the whole idea of doing things for the simple reason that I enjoy them seems rather alien to her.
Some people just pre-judge what others should be like and there's very little you can do about it. Sherlock is chaotic and noisy - two things they don't like, so they were never going to be impressed with him. My mother-in-law thinks her daughter's two sons wonderful because they're accountants, whereas mine's "only" a coach driver.
I'm glad you got some sleep, John, and were able to talk to Lestrade.
Sometimes family is the best thing in the world, and sometimes it's the one thing you can count on to make your day difficult. I'm glad it went better than you thought it would, and I hope that if you all see them again it will go even smoother.
Glad to hear that you managed to have a talk and some sleep, John.
Families are... yeah. Mine certainly works best with us all well out of casual visiting distance from each other :-)
To be fair, I think I'd struggle if friends or family visited with a small child who was 50% noise and 50% chaos; OTOH, I'm not a parent and never have been, and I struggle a bit when anyone brings any child around for a visit. Hopefully over time your parents will come to see all the good stuff about Sherlock that maybe gets eclipsed in the whirlwind.
I think your parents are spot on that Lestrade is a good influence on you (although perhaps not in the way they think), and I hope they recognise that you're a good influence on him too :-)
I hope they also recognise the absolutely fantastic job you're doing with Sherlock and Mycroft; raising two boys with genius IQs and very different emotional needs is a tough job, and you and Lestrade are doing it brilliantly (which is demonstration in itself that neither of you are trapped in some of the most unhelpful learnt behaviours from your own childhoods).
My parents were just the same but mostly only with each other. All through my childhood I knew that they were absolutely everything to each other but time and again they gave each other the silent treatment instead of having two sentence conversation that would have sorted out whatever it was. It drove me bats and left me very, very uncomfortable with people sulking. I know that if they'd been shouters and screamers I would hate that now, and I'm sure they didn't argue because that would have freaked us kids out, but we never could get them to realise that week long silences were every bit as bad!
It's easy to see that for people who repress, someone like Sherlock who almost never represses must be, I don't know, shocking, I suppose.
The best thing about this is that you do speak to L., that can't have been easy at the beginning given your upbringing, and yet you have learned to do that.
I'm sort of amazed - and quite proud, really, that John and I came from such totally different ends of the spectrum as far as that sort of thing went in childhood and we still manage to not only be in a relationship, but also not do such a bad job bringing up the boys.
Maybe that's part of why it works. We sort of balance each other out?
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not sure how to put what I want to say, and i really hope it comes out right--it's not meant to be critical in any way. (If it doesn't, please forgive me and ignore it all, okay?)
It's a very hard thing when you see and deal with the world in a very different way than your family does. It's even harder when that difference makes it so that home isn't a refuge from dealing with the rest of the world but is part of the problem. It seems to me, John and L, that although the circumstances were very different, that was something true of both your childhoods, and that you both ultimately ended up dealing with it much the same way--instead of needing or trying to control the world around you, you aim to control yourselves and make yourselves your own sources of strength and stability from which to operate.
And while the uncontolled world is risky and dangerous and full of ugliness and pitfalls, it's also exciting and stimulating and interesting and full of beauty and challenges and adventure. It's not necessarily better or worse than a more controlled environment--but it is bigger, and possibly so are the rewards.
(And as I see you expand your own centers to include each other as sources of strength and stability, I can't help thinking that's a very good thing for both of you--a broader base is steadier, after all. And it makes me very happy to see.) (I'm sorry if that's too personal.)
SH - Is this the same Lestrade we know, or is this a different one from the one who's encouraging you to bounce on an inflatable Stonehenge?
Ha. The very same. He's flexible like that. And yes, I'm not really sure my parents understand the concept of doing things because you enjoy them either. Or fun in general. I wish there were something I could do to help them be happier, but I don't think there is.
Pip - thanks. I think it will be easier next time, if we go back.
Nameless - I think it's any disturbance in their routine that they object to. These are people, after all, who have had spaghetti every Wednesday night for the last forty years or so (and chicken on Mondays, and toast and coffee every morning for literally as long as I can remember).
Anon - I think you're right, whatever we deal with when we're growing up, we wind up convinced that something else would've been better.
for people who repress, someone like Sherlock who almost never represses must be, I don't know, shocking, I suppose.
I think that's a large part of it, yeah.
(Should I delete my last comment? I wouldn't mind.)
what have you and the boys been up to today John? I hope it was nothing too hard to enjoy after a broken night :-)
You're fine RR, just haven't had a moment to respond
No worries! I just hope you're managing a good day despite the short night. :)
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It is one of thoae things that's so far apart it's close together again.
Thank you, again, for letting us meet your folks though. It does help understand, seeing them and how they live.
L - I'm glad. It was worth it then.
I think we'll have to agree to never let our parents meet, though. It'd probably cause some sort of implosion.
Agreed. Ideally Mrs Holmes should never meet any of our parents either.
Are you sure she hasn't? :)
I assume she hasn't met them, but knows everything about them, personally. Probably had the spy satellites over them.
I sometimes wonder if I should ask her about my Dad. She's probably found the old bastard if he's still about.
I guess the real question is if you want to know or not.
The answer to that changes frequently.
Yeah, I can understand that. Maybe wait until you're sure?
(I think you can safely assume that if it were likely that he'd cause any problems at some point, you'd have heard about it from Mrs. Holmes without having to ask.)
Oddly enough I was wondering just the other day if you would ever mention the trip to your parents place, or if it had been sort of elided over by other events.
It's funny how things that we don't talk about pretty quickly become things that we can't talk about and sometimes go on to become things that we mustn't talk about. It's different, now that I'm an adult and my mom's getting old enough to not worry about protecting me, but the older I get, the clearer it becomes that my mother and I have completely different memories about my childhood. Not in a bad way, just in the sense that she thought I was thinking or learning one thing and I thought she was thinking or teaching something else entirely.
It's only recently that she's acknowledged that she might have gotten it wrong when we weren't told something because she didn't think we were mature enough to know, or because she didn't want us to worry about it. (Although of my siblings, I think I'm the only one who really still is narked about it.) To be fair, she was trying to let us live in a world that felt secure, even after my father walked out on us. And I probably didn't need to know when I was seven that she was thinking about giving me and my little brother up for adoption, because she didn't know if she could afford to feed us.
But it's taken us a while to get to the place where those confidences come to light. Lots of conversations, with me as an adult (and occasionally with me being very childish) and the most enlightening ones have been about her childhood during the Great Depression.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I think if you can make opportunities to talk with your parents now and then, or even a chance to visit without our favorite chaos molecule in tow, you may find chances to talk about the things you never thought they'd discuss with you.
rsf
RR - I've never imagined him causing problems. Probably barely even remembers me.
RSF - I'm glad you are at a place where you can talk. I think it's very hard to choose what kids should know and what they shouldn't. And in some ways, you're sort of bound to get it wrong, because hindsight is 20/20.
RSF - That's really great that you can talk to your mum now and maybe understand some things you couldn't as a child. I don't really think I'm willing to try that yet.
Either way, you can take your time, L.
And really, so can you, John.
RSF, it's a very good thing that you've been able to talk with your mother about so much, and that you have such a good understanding about the differences in your memories. That can be a really hard concept to get your head and heart around. (It's still a fraught issue with one of my siblings and my mother; they remember things very differently.)
Mmm. Perhaps. Although I always imagine finally deciding I want to see him and then discovering he's died. Still, hopefully someone would tell me, somehow, if he does.
Danger - the way your life has changed in tha past few years I don't think anyone would blame you for taking your time settling into it yourself, before wanting to open it up to anyone else. Which makes me feel very privileged that I'm here at all.
Always true, L -- but it's not something you have any control over, and I think your decision about wanting to see him or not is more important anyway.
L - I'm glad you are. I quite literally can't imagine where I'd be without you and Sherlock and Mycroft.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say this John but you and your little family are a real inspiration. The background of you and Greg and the experiences the boys have had could all have resulted in a very messy situation and instead they have resulted in the most loving and supportive family :-)
there's a weird air about this palce today, someone upset you John or you jsut tired
Just thinking too much. It never goes well. And probably tired as well.
I thought sumone might have upset you whenI was reading this, glad thats not it but thinkings not a bad thing even when its hard.
No one feel sorry for Doc. We all know what he's thinking about:
Ha. The very same. He's flexible like that.
And flexible other ways as well, presumably, Doc? ;)
DW - oh, absolutely. In just about every way, I should think.
sorry if we aren't supposed to say it, I'm guessing we're probably not but I agree that you and your boys are an inspiration John, whatever life has thrown at you you all seem to be determined to make the best of now!
John, it took a while, and a lot of innocuous conversations to get to some of the harder things -- and I've been surprised at times, because some of the things I thought my mom wouldn't want to talk about she was perfectly happy to discuss. She didn't realize that I'd constructed a wall around the topic because it never came up -- she just was busy with other things. And I'd never advocate jumping right for the hard topics first anyway. But if you can find more neutral things to start with -- some of your mom's recipes, perhaps, since you've taken up cooking, and then ask where she learned to make them? Then maybe you can ease your parents into the habit of talking more. Don't mind me if you're in no rush to do so, though; I'm at the point where I can see the end of my opportunities for conversations with my mother looming, and it probably feels like more of a priority for me than it does for you.
Anyway, you and Lestrade seem to have found a way to provide Sherlock and Mycroft with enough of a steadying routine for them to be secure without getting locked into a regular meal plan. (Although I suspect that Sherlock wouldn't object to regularly scheduled portions of ice cream.)
Parent-child relationships are always frought with pitfalls, but the best of them are always underlined with love. Plus, both of you seem to have a good sense of what is and isn't appropriate to tell the boys.
I think that once your parents sees Sherlock grow up over time, they'll understand that it's his passion and energy for life that drives his "chaos." There's nothing wrong with that =) I am happy to hear that your parents approve of Lestrade, flexibility, leather jackets, and all. ;)
~A from NW
OT, but I found a web article about Stonehenge that Mycroft might like to read before you go bouncing.
rsf
I wish they'd take bouncy Stonhenge on a tour of the States when they're done with it in the UK--I could borrow a niece or two for cover!
Who needs cover, RR? I would happily go bouncing with my friends all day if they brought it here!
Wellll...maybe not so much for cover, but I have to think it's more fun as a shared experience, no? :D
I think you'd quickly talk to other people when bouncing on a huge stonehenge.
You may have a point there.
You gonna ask them to send it over here? :)
I want it to come to Salem for Halloween. That would be brilliant.
rsf
I'm afraid we may never be done with it.
That would certainly put a damper on our plans... :(
Are you in Boston, RSF? I'll be visiting up there for Halloween, and plan to hit Salem during the wacky time! Want to meet for tea maybe?
I am in Boston, pip, and you can pm me on LJ about Salem.
John, I stopped to see Billy Elliott tonight on a whim (and got front row center of the dress circle!) and before the play I had a bite to eat at a place which had flourless chocolate cake on the menu. I've been curious about it ever since you made it for Lestrade, and now that I've had it I want the recipe more than ever. How did you ever scrape Sherlock off the ceiling afterwards?
rsf
Oh, the cake recipe! Sorry, it completely slipped my mind. Remind me again if it's not up by tomorrow. I have it saved on my phone so I should be able to post it tonight.
And now I might need to drag L out for some more bouncing.
Do a flip! I did a flip! Lestrade only helped a bit, John do one!
I...did not really do a flip. But it was still fun.
It's a bit harder for me to help you than it is to help Sherlock.
Speaking of...I think I spy him climbing a stone. Or a henge. Or a bit he shouldnt be climbing...
How... That shouldn't even be possible. Excuse me, I'll be back.
he's been trying all day to bounce enough to grab onto one of the top bits of a ..whatever they are called. Guess he managed it. I think it would have very un-gracefully slumped over if he really got onto it.
He's not pleased I stopped him. I think someone's cranky and needs to eat. Might be him, might be me, I'm not saying.
I'll go and get him and try to convince him to let us go and eat. i may use ice cream as a bribe.
Lestrade - are you talking about Sherlock, or NannyJohn?
both, of course :)
Yay! A flip! Well done, Sherlock.
John, thank you for the recipe in advance. I ate the other half of the slice of cake I got last night for breakfast (it was THAT rich) and I think it's going to have to be a permanent part of my future. Lovely stuff.
L, ice cream as a bribe sounds good. Any chance Sherlock will actually exhaust himself bouncing?
rsf
yeah, every chance he'll go from hyperactive to grumpy... he's pretty grumpy now that the bouncing has stopped.
(He's talking about Sherlock this time, not me.)
...no, still both of you :)
...Maybe a bit. I think after Sherlock I enjoyed that the most out of all of us, which doesn't say much for my level of maturity.
You have the perfect level of maturity. Young and lively with a rich taste and full body that titillates the tongue. Or something.
It sounds like you've all had a great time :-)
John the real sign of maturity is knowing how to let go and have fun when the time requires it :-) at least that's what I tell myself ;-) I hope the evening continues the fun :-)
Just because... ;)
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