Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.

It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I’m sad to say that this method works. If you don’t give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. I’ve certainly made up for it since, and for this, I am proud and grateful.

the prolonged period of tension before landing his blows, as we were systematically inspected, chided, and humiliated, had a far worse effect than the actual hits. This certainly contributed more to our need to shut down, as we all learned early that the best way to cope in that time when his ire was building and his cruelty unfurling was to give nothing away, to try and become nothing, the nothing he both thought of us and wanted us to remain.

I didn’t understand what had happened, but of course I assumed it must have been something I had done.

I can’t remember how I came to know, whether it was kids gossiping at school or something I overheard at home, but soon I understood that the change in my father’s behavior was because he was seeing another woman, and that Tom and I were a constant reminder of the life that trapped him.

sometimes people do you a favor when they drop out of your life.

I loved my granny. I think she was the first person to let me know it was okay to be different.

It was Granddaddy for me—unconditional love and support regardless of what was going on in life, an assurance things weren’t always my fault, and a willingness to be patient with me both in teaching me and in just listening. To find some who listens from a place of love is a miracle worth celebrating and passing along to others.

When Granny came to visit us, the atmosphere in the house changed. Her spirit infected everyone. My father was in better spirits and we felt safer when she was near.

Again, so much Granddaddy. He protected me from Grandmother Phillips’s abuse and tempers.

I never heard Granny say a bad word about my father, but I know she was incredibly supportive of my mum leaving him. She always wished the best for everyone. I think I have inherited some of her mischief and joie de vivre, and I hope her compassion.

I strive never to say a bad word about the girls’ father. After everything he put me through, all the waking/living nightmares and trauma I still ask how he is.

use our imaginations more, enjoy our memories but live in the moment.

“I can imagine,” he said coolly. “I’ve had those reporter fellows at my door a few times saying things that were a shock to me.” Oh, I’m sorry, I thought we were discussing the fact that I’ve believed for forty-five years that you were my father when you’re not. I didn’t know we were back to talking about you, and how maligned you’ve been by the tabloids. Sorry. His narcissism knew no bounds.

And there pops Grandmother Phillips and my ex husband.

Oh boy, here we go, the old “We stayed together for you kids” routine. So, not only was I, through my newfound half-breed status, responsible for my own abuse, but the fact that this abuse lasted for so many years was due to the kindness and self-sacrifice of my abuser?! Great.

Heard my mother say this once. I wanted to shout “just leave, take WM and LEAVE”.

Scots were the first to ever catalog the word fuck!

The first thing that struck me was why my grandfather had chosen to join the Cameron Highlanders and not a battalion closer to his home. I learned that the Highlanders had a great reputation for being a very loyal, closely knit group of soldiers. Thinking back to the fact that my granddad had been an orphan, I thought perhaps he was looking for a family in the military.

Tom and I had traveled up to the estate to speak to him about our childhood. It did not go well. But the ensuing silence and absence of him from our lives because of this confrontation enabled us both to move on. We both felt a freedom from his legacy, and a clarity, that we had never before experienced.

had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, and now I was tending to the little boy inside who’d never had the chance to properly play. I didn’t question it. I went with it. I liked it.

Had I not had the childhood I did, would these traits not be so at the forefront of my personality? Who knows? All I know is that I am the product of all the experiences I have had, good and bad, and if I am in a happy place in my life (as I truly am), then I can have no regrets about any of the combination of events and circumstances that have led me to the here and now.

They retreated and were eventually evacuated from Dunkirk. Of the original eight hundred Cameron Highlanders who went to France, only seventy-nine answered the roll call when they returned to Britain.

the retreat to Dunkirk and the emotional and psychological toll it took on the men involved. One thing he said about my grandfather in particular stuck in my mind. “He’s probably wondering, ‘Why me? Why did I get lucky?’”

I came to believe that I, and my failings, were the cause of all my life’s woes:

My father loathed me, so it was only natural I should loathe myself. My mother countered him, though. She told me I was special and loved. And actually, having two such opposing messages, although confusing, was ultimately pretty healthy. My father told me I was worthless, my mother that I was precious. They couldn’t both be right, but they evened each other out and I began to make my own mind up, not just about myself but about everything that was going on around me. I

The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.

Rather alarmingly, considering the fragile state of both my and Tommy Darling’s psyches at this stage of our parallel stories, the Imperial War Museum is housed in the Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam, London’s once notorious lunatic asylum.

a historian and expert on military psychiatry.

Definition of a boffin

“These records were systematically destroyed after the Second World War if someone had a major psychiatric admission, because of the stigma attached to mental illness.” I suddenly felt a rush of animosity towards the military establishment, towards a country that sent its poor young men to war and let their brains become addled only to destroy any record of such damage, thereby heaping shame back onto the very young men who had given and lost so much in the first place. No wonder there is still such stigma today.

I came to understand that Hamlet really didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be absent. He wanted to be back at university with his friends. He is sickened with his mother’s hasty marriage, distraught to be asked by the ghost of his father—a distant man I thought he didn’t particularly connect with—to avenge his death. To add to it, his girlfriend is dumping him and his friends are spying on him. I decided that there was no way Hamlet was mad. He was slipping into the same deep water as me. He was at the start of a nervous breakdown too.

I began to use my fatigue and also the need for solitude to prepare for the performances to cover up what was an actual inability to think about anything else. I pushed my friends, and my wife, far away.

Just as when I was a little boy dealing with my father, I thought it must be my fault my lovers were so angry. Now, of course, I can see that it was stupid, irrational, and self-abusive to think so, but it was still a hard habit to kick.

I needed to remind myself that wherever my future might take me, it was important never to forget where I’d come from.

Sometimes the lowest common denominator is a positive thing,

Bras are not comfortable, for one thing. They are itchy and restricting and have weird wires and springs, making you feel as if you are wearing some sort of cantilever system rather than an article of clothing, which of course you are.

For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics. And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.

spent days just gazing at the ceiling of my little flat, remembering and reliving pieces of my childhood that I could now fully access. It was truly horrifying, but it was also incredibly liberating because in accessing these horrible memories I was beginning to understand who I really was. Such a huge part of my psyche had been closed off for so long, and now I was embracing the fullness of my life experience for the first time.

we’ve gone through life feeling unhappy and unable to acknowledge our achievements because we still feel unworthy—as being told we are useless is so ingrained in us.

You would stop us from leaving the house to go out. We felt no security in our own decisions and skills.

We want you to somehow acknowledge that you remember some of the things we are talking about. In some way talking about it is acknowledging that it happened. And we are releasing the past, letting it go so we can all move forward and on. We are giving you back the things you gave us.

nervous that suddenly springing all this on our father would alienate him and do the exact opposite of what we both intended and needed, which was some sort of acknowledgment of his actions and ownership of the past. I didn’t want to scare him away, but I wanted him to hear the truth too.

We were going to give back to our father that which was not ours, and what we never should have been given in the first place.

confront our father with our childhood demons.

A successful relationship requires a level of self-knowledge and comfort with oneself,

For the first time in my childhood, but certainly not the last, I encountered an upsetting experience and decided the best way to deal with it was to pretend it had never happened. And so it didn’t.

Wisdom and guidance can come from the most unexpected places.

have to start the process of normalizing this chapter of my life, making it something that had happened to me, not something that I was still living.

Of course that made perfect sense. I remembered how easily my dad could see the negative in any exchange. More and more, as we dug further into the past, I began to remember how deeply and often my father twisted reality into the paranoia-filled world he inhabited.

It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.

solidarity and support and love, ironically three things I never felt from my father and three things I think Tommy Darling could have done with a whole lot more of.

“Finding out about him and having to share that with my mum and my family has kind of reinforced my belief that it’s really important to be honest and open and to have no skeletons in the closet. Cos, you know, the truth can hurt, but not knowing can hurt more.”

the only truth: there is never shame in being open and honest.

as with any traumatic happening, it was important to give it weight, to acknowledge the effect it must be having on me, and to use the talking about it as a way to cleanse my system. That way I would eventually be able to create some distance, and therefore some objectivity.

The premise of this group was that mental health professionals would give free hourly increments of mental health services to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then in turn the people who received this free care would give an hour of their time to some form of community service. I liked the way it was so simple and straight to the heart of the problem, and also that the veterans who were receiving the care were also able to give something back in return.