Dragon Slaying In The Modern Era.

I learnt something about myself recently.

This isn’t a new revelation; it’s been dawning for quite a while.

I grew up in a walled off environment. A place where you were not allowed to develop a self that deviated from an already mapped out plan. A place where if you stepped off the pre-ordained path you were punished and then shoved right back onto that path. A place where individuality was almost criminal, where personal development was a heretic notion, where being anything other than a predestined automaton was not allowed.

I broke free relatively early but those insidious lessons remained in the background of my mind, always there to through the shadow of the doubt over me.

The enlightenment process has taken 20 odd years to come to fruition, but come it did in one massive temper tantrum – thankfully not mine.

My mother turned 70 this year and we thought, well if not now not when and organised a surprise birthday party. Tracked down old friends, contacted her newer friends, invited family from far and wide.  And they accepted without hesitation.

Preparations were made, a venue was booked.

And then the storm clouds started rumbling in.

Four days out from the party I got a call from dad, he was forced to tell her about the party due to her increasingly erratic behaviour.

And all hell broke loose.

In the temper tantrum to end them all she insisted by verbal abuse and the whole “You have no right” threat to make sure the party was cancelled. Being thoroughly sick of over forty years of vitriol I decided if she wanted to cancel her own party she could do it herself.

Something snapped that day.

I refuse to be abused for helping to organise a birthday party.

Enough of this demoralising brain washing that we have been submitting to for so long.

Mothers oft preached sermon of “You’re not good enough, don’t ever bring your friends home because what will people think,” was about to commence.

Of course my father who so wanted to do this one nice thing for her was directly in the firing line of all that venom. Put my mother in a pit of vipers and you’d find she’d emerge some time later from a pit full of terrified suicidal snakes.

Dad had, three weeks earlier undergone quadruple bypass surgery. His last words to me before going into theater were “This party for your mum goes ahead no matter what happens”.

I watched my mother snatch the list of invitee’s and start dialling.

All sweetness and light explaining to some of the invitee’s that she was just so tired she was cancelling the party, that dad had just been released from hospital after major surgery (in fact he was two weeks out and doing amazingly well) and she didn’t think it would be good for him to have all that excitement.

And then she’d hang up and proceed to berate my father, call him stupid, selfish, good for nothing, standing over him like the bully she is screaming “I wish you had died in surgery”.

For the relatives who were invited she let loose. No need to pretend to be a fine upstanding citizen, its only family.