The Inheritance

My father left when I was ten.

That is a short sentence for something people are determined to make very long. Tell them and they begin looking at you as though you are a piece of furniture with an interesting crack. They tilt their heads. They ask whether you have ever considered that this might explain something.

Of course it might. So might breakfast.

I have no objection to examining the past. I have spent enough of my life buried in books to know that what came before matters. What I object to is the assumption that history is a verdict, delivered once, against which there can be no appeal.

My father left. That happened. I cannot improve the event by describing it as character-building, and I cannot undo it by pretending it was of no consequence. Both are convenient forms of dishonesty. One turns a child’s loss into a motivational poster; the other gives the impression that children are made of something rather less impressionable than people.

I was ten. I noticed.

The question is what follows from that. People are terribly keen to tell you. Apparently, if a man achieves something, it must be because he is seeking the approval of the father who left him. If he argues, he has authority issues. If he is certain, he is covering insecurity. If he is uncertain, the diagnosis is confirmed.

It is a wonderful system. It requires no evidence and cannot be wrong. I have encountered worse theories, but usually only in papers that have passed peer review.

There is some comfort in believing the past explains everything. It allows us to look at a person as a completed calculation: put in the childhood, carry the trauma, and out comes the adult. If the result is unfortunate, well, the mathematics was against him.

The trouble is that this gives a great deal of power to someone who has already left the room.

I have made mistakes. Some have been expensive. Some have involved the sort of confidence that feels like intelligence until the bill arrives. I would like to say that each was the consequence of a childhood absence. It would make for a coherent account, and coherence is a splendid thing to possess when one is trying to avoid responsibility.

Unfortunately, some mistakes were simply mine.

That is less comforting and more useful. If a decision is mine, I can examine it. I can change what I do next. I can apologise where an apology is owed, repair what can be repaired and stop pretending that the world is obliged to understand why I did something before it is allowed to notice the damage.

None of that requires me to deny what happened when I was ten. It requires me to recognise that it happened to me, not that I happened because of it.

There is a difference. It took me longer than I would like to admit to see it.

My father’s departure is part of my history. It is not a qualification, an excuse or a moral achievement. I did not earn it. I do not need to be grateful for it. And I do not need to spend the rest of my life proving that it made me stronger.

I would rather build something that works.

If it fails, I will have to fix it. I cannot send the problem back forty years and ask a ten-year-old to take responsibility. He had enough to deal with.