And Never the Twain Shall Meet

Why do we do the things we do? What overarching principle governs our behaviour? For me, I think relationships. "No man is an island", "I am a part of all that I have met", "Let me live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man", all favourite sayings and ways of seeing life. Daughter, sister, friend, mother, wife, child of God, cousin, church member, volunteer, citizen - all are ways of relating to others and are important to me. I measure my success in life by my successful relationships and my failures by the relationships that failed. Not everyone puts priority on relationships. The church I belong to is first of all "Gemeinde", a group of like minded people who put relationship above personal interests. The community I live in puts relationship above individual interests. In the family, relationship counts for more than "doing it my way". As part of various groups, I am continually making compromises in order to preserve relationships. And that is a way of living that I find satisfactory. For my father, relationships were of primary importance and from him I probably learned this way of thinking.

Relationships were not of top priority for my mother. Preserving identity seemed to be most important to her. She seemed to have a fear of having her self-image swallowed up by others and was continually on the defensive, not a good way to build relationship.

My husband spent his life trying to assure himself of acceptance. Acceptance by his mother and siblings was never unqualified and so he went through life living an act, the act that he thought would make him acceptable to the ones who mattered most to him, his birth family, who alternated between acceptance and rejection. To the general public, he presented the image that others would smile on and would never refuse any request, no matter how inconvienient, in case that should lead to rejection. Intimacy is impossible when you're playing a role; the real you can never come out because it's not safe out there. That also interferes with relationship because relationship has to be based on trust, which has to be mutual. We never had the relationship I had hoped for when we first married.

Why did his mother do this to herself and to her children? Power seemed to be her dominating motivation. Feeling powerless to control the events of her life, she put all her energies into trying to control the people in her life. It was a very uneasy relationship between her and her children, who resented her for her controlling ways and felt guilty for that resentment because they understood her powerlessness. In turn, they turned their resentment against each other and tried to control their siblings, in particular, their youngest brother, my husband.

Where did their mother learn this behaviour? Was it from her mother? Her mother had a child before she married and married a man who was born illegimate, whose mother, also born illegitimate, died when he was fourteen. He brought up a family of thirteen children. What sort of life did they lead? His granddaughter said, as an old lady, " The Hannahs nae were a very sociable family". Was there love and acceptance in that home? My husband's mother left that physical environment behind her but brought the emotional environment with her and condemned herself to live with it to the end of her days. Now it lives on through her children and grandchildren. George Hannay, what did you do to Isobel Fairbairn almost two hundred years ago that the ripples should extend to the present day?