Teenager Ben Kinsella Murdered in Holloway, London 30 June 2008

Our friends brought their two year old son round to play with our little boy, yesterday. It was a beautiful summer day: the sun warm and bright. The lawn was newly mown, and the flowers in tubs and pots around our decking were looking lovely.

We played in the garden, and ate lunch together round the table. Then we dads took the boys out in their buggies for a walk in the sunshine, and to get them off to sleep for afternoon naps.

Unusually, as we walked along the road, there was a crowd at the end of our street. Two crowds – girls on one side of the road, boys on the other. And police tape. Police cars. Photographers.

As we approached the scene, a feeling of tension in the air. My friend ventured a guess before we got close enough to see anything more of the scene that lay around the corner. He had seen the the blue and white police tape strung across the road, and flapping in the breeze. “Do you think it’s another stabbing?”.

Forensic officers in white paper suits moved quickly back and forth, behind a cordon of police officers, who were diverting traffic and answering enquiries from concerned pedestrians.

The story unfolded on the television knews later that day. At around 2am on Sunday morning, 16 year old Ben Kinsella became the 17th teenager murdered in London’s streets this year [murder of teenager Ben Kinsella]. He’d been stabbed following a fight at a local bar and nightspot, popular with young people from across the area.

Reports today say that Ben may not even have been involved in the argument in the bar, but that he had been chased by a group of youths after running away from potential trouble.

Last year (2007), 27 teenagers were killed on London’s streets. 18 were stabbed to death, 8 were shot and one was beaten. This unprecedented level of violence prompted calls for new measures to deal with London’s teenage gang, knife and gun crime problem. But the trend has continued into 2008 [London's teenage murder victims 2008].

The victims of this year’s tally have been between 14 and 19 years of age. Despite police and media focus on teenage knife crime, in most cases it appears that their assailants have been older than their victims. At least three involved assailants in their twenties, and one a 45 year old man. This may be more about a rise in cases of fatal violence against teenagers, rather than an increase in teenage violence [questions asked over teen murders].

The issue has been sensationalised by a media eager to exploit public fears [the truth about street weapons].

But that won’t be any comfort to the 17 families who have lost a son or daughter to violence in London in the year so far, or to the others who will inevitably suffer similar loss as the year goes on.

My eldest son is 15. Just a year younger than Ben. How much should I be concerned for him? Or for his sister (now 13) and baby brother (2)? Can we let our hearts go out to the families affected by this violence, yet accept it, assuming that statistically it is unlikely to happen to our own?

Family isn’t a word, its a sentence 15 June 2008

We’re not totally disfunctional, my family.

I mean, there’s the stuff I mentioned about my father, okay, but that’s it.

Oh, and my wife not talking to me [send me to coventry]. And maybe we haven’t .. you know .. much. Since the baby. Actually, I mean, since he was conceived. And only once since he was born. He’s nearly two now.

I haven’t mentioned my daughter in this blog yet. She is struggling (make that refusing) to accept her stepfather, since her mother re-married last year. She still lives with them, but she really has made it difficult for her mother and her new husband. She’s just about to turn thirteen, though, so maybe she was going to be difficult anyway.

And, I’m not cool with her mother (my first wife) anyway.

Upside for me is that my daughter is keen to spend more time with us. As a result, she has really bonded with her baby brother.

So why was I so struck by the title of the post I saw the other day - family isn’t a word, its a sentence? It really struck a nerve with me.

I linked to Hallie’s blog in my last post, but just I read something she wrote a year ago [hard questions]. Hardly anyone seems to make a relationship work anymore. Even when there are kids involved.

Family relationships can be difficult. And sometimes it does feel like a life sentence, trying to make a marriage work. Trying to keep a family together.

I heard a little boy in a playground the other day, ask a little girl “What’s your step-father’s name”. She said “I don’t have a step-father”. And he said “Yes you do. Everybody’s got a step-father!”. How I wish that wasn’t nearly true.

About my father 10 June 2008

My parents live about 400 miles from us. Which is not a lot, as distances go. Less than a day by train or car. And my parents have recently retired, which maybe should have meant that I would be seeing more of them. But they seem to be too busy, too afraid of coming to the big city, too reluctant to to disturb the routine with their dog and their neighbours and their own friends.

I have a job, and a wife and three kids, two of whom don’t live with us full time but visit weekends. Somehow my folks are missing out on developing a close relationship with their grandchildren. And I’m not spending as much time as I’d like with my father.

A lot of it is about the dog. Dad thinks (and has said on more than one occassion) that the dog is his baby, his youngest child. He thinks that the dog, my brother and I are siblings. He won’t come to visit without the dog, and my wife is allergic to them.

I don’t know whether the dog is just an excuse though. My parents get the dog looked after maybe two to four times a year when they go on holiday. I don’t know why they can’t do that and come and spend a week here. I’d like to spend a little more time with Dad without the dog.

Part of me is surprised to find that as a grown man (and I’m now in my 40s !) I still feel the need for a parent. Its not that I was ever neglected as a child. My parents were close, family oriented. This distance has grown between us during the years of work, marriage and family. Strange, really. I’d have thought that having three grandchildren might have pulled us closer together, but maybe during that time we have been living such seperate lives. The breakdown of my first marriage didn’t help. But why hasn’t it gotten better?

It’s time we started a dialogue, don’t you think, reader?

What is it that I’m missing, and is it the same for you?

Tell everyone, why don’t you ! 2 June 2008

I suppose I was asking for it when I wrote my last post [Send me to Coventry].

The universe just had to teach me a lesson !

Last week I sent out a request for some information to a bunch of people at work. I’d already discussed this individually with each of them, and I’d layed out what I wanted from them in a workshop meeting about a week before.

I knew what their issues were with what I was asking for (“this is going to take some time” and ”this is going to benefit your department, but doesn’t really help mine”). But I thought I’d persuaded them to help me out.

So I send an email, thanking them for their support, describing the information I need, and (critically) asking anyone who has a problem to email me, without copying everyone else in.

So what happens? First, a couple of emails asking for clarification. No problem. Then one reading way too far between the lines, identifying a range of risks and issues, and suggesting that no one should do anything until we know a whole lot more than we do now. Finally, one that says wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if my department found all of the information for itself, so that the cost of getting it falls on the department that wants it most.

The thing is that every one of them hit “reply all” and told everyone. Now, instead of having a few problems to unpick, I have a real mess on my hands.

A few years ago my first wife put the nail in the coffin of our relationship by doing something similar. Our marriage had been on and off the rocks for a couple of years. We’d broken up and gotten back together again so many times that people joked about it behind my back at work. The kids had spent half of their lives without one or other of us living at home. They had seen too many arguments, and I had heard too many promises of “I know we can’t afford it, but if we just buy this one thing I’m gonna be happy”. And, in the background, there were her affairs with other men.

This is an area that guys don’t like to to talk about much. There’s a lot of shame in being a cuckold. And eventually I got sick of being in a sexless, loveless relationship myself, and for a while I too found someone else.

Throughout all this though, I really, really, really wanted to make it work. I was obsessive about it. It didn’t matter what we’d been through. We’d gotten through it. We were still a family, and being a husband and a father was what I wanted to be.

But the clincher came when she decided that everyone we knew had to know about my affair. Maybe it was guilt about her own behaviour: the gap between the person she portrayed herself to be to our friends and the person she had become. But she told them all what I had done, and in a few short weeks, my friends all seemed to have abandoned me.

I never recovered. I probably never will. I found out that I had no one who would stand by me. No one who even cared to listen to my story. My friends distanced themselves from me, and pushed me out, and I realised that what I had been fighting for had been a lie.

I fought on for about a year after that. Bound in our relationship by a desire to do the right thing, for myself, for my wife, for my kids. But I was lost. Betrayed by everyone I knew. And when my wife started demanding that I move out again, something she did constantly and with little provocation, I knew that I would never feel any respect for her ever again. And I left.

I often have reason to regret leaving. My kids missed out on the family life I so wanted them to have. And I have missed so much of their growing up. My wife used them as weapons in our divorce, and they both suffered as a result. But five years on my relationship with the kids is good and getting better. My ex will be friendly sometimes, and just as crazy as ever, others.

The fall-out from telling everyone can be just devastating sometimes. The lesson – there are times when ”the least said, the better”.

Send me to Coventry 31 May 2008

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of our relationship over the past few days. Of course her aim, with this silent treatment, may be to make me do just that.

I try to make small talk with her. But she has sent me to Coventry.

This is a funny expression that English people like to use. Coventry is a small city in Warwickshire, England, known for its manufacturing industry and for its two Cathedrals: the modern one was built in 1962 to replace its predecessor, which was destroyed in a German bombing raid in 1940. The phrase though, probably dates back events during the English Civil War (c.1648). [origins of this phrase]

My point here is that this particular type of bad behaviour is a least a couple of hundred years old. Can it really be true that no one, in all this time, has worked out a way of saying “Hey ! This really isn’t going to make anything any better now, is it?”

We are by no means unique in failing to communicate in our relationship. I came across a blog by Miss Scribbler the other day [Sellotaped together relationship]. She deals, in a remarkably frank way, with issues including communication, sex, and caring that have also affected my own relationship.

But the silent treatment, it seems to me, is a peculiar type of dysfunctional behaviour. To elect not to communicate, to retreat into oneself, and cut the connection with your partners thoughts and feelings, is to deny the possibility of understanding, of love, and of caring.

Some years ago I went through some similar stuff with my first wife. Of course, my current partner knows this and points to this as evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with me, as two otherwise sane women have been reduced to treating me in the same crappy way.

I’m not convinced. I’m really not, in any way that I can see, really desperately flawed. Oh, I’m not perfect, but I’m, you know – okay.

So if I do something that’s annoying sometimes, or if I don’t seem to think just the way they do, even if its an aspect of my character, I’m really expecting other people to show me the same kind of tolerance and kindness that I try to show them.

When I think of it that way, then the silent treatment really seems to be a betrayal.

I don’t think that you can talk your way out of every problem in a relationship. I went through break-ups and counselling and reconciliation and support with my first wife. I haven’t blogged about that (yet), but I recognise some parallels with the experiences described in this blog [A journey through couples therapy].

But for sure, you can’t “not talk” your way out either. And not talking seems like one of the fastest and most effective ways to increase the emotional distance and break down the links between you.

In my experience, it’s during those times of “not talking” that history gets re-written. Good memories get replaced with bad. Love gets forgotten, and loathing increased. Caring gets replaced with contempt, and the values and behaviours that bind a relationship together: loyalty, empathy and forgiveness, are percieved as signs of weakness instead of strength.

But I can’t say this to her. I may think I have the moral high ground, but this won’t help me bridge the gap between us.

I’ll try to wait my time for now. To speak to her gently. To be caring. Avoid addressing the issue head-on.

I’ll give her time, and hope that she tires of the effort it takes to keep up this wall of silence. And that I can say the right things when she is ready to listen.