Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter by Alison Wearing

Author:Alison Wearing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345807618
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2013-05-06T18:30:00+00:00

BORDERS AND CREAM PUFFS

Children of parents who live separately have no trouble understanding what a border crossing is between countries, for we contain a similar cleft within ourselves: between mother and father, varying styles of homes and comforts, rules and expectations. It’s not a bad thing, and it might even make us more adaptable, more understanding of diversity and respectful of different ways of being in the world. Those of us who trundle between parents are seasoned travellers before we ever leave our home country.

In some cases, the border is virtually non-existent, a sort of Switzerland-to-Austria arrangement that sees mild differences in culture and codes of law, a shared language and respectful communication (peppered with private eye-rolling). In other families, the border is more Middle Eastern in feeling, rife with suspicions (real or imagined), accusations (real or imagined), and so thoroughly saturated with hatred and mistrust that the children’s internal landscape grows up around emotional landmines and barbed fences that they might well spend their adult lives untangling or detonating.

In our case, the border was definitely more peaceful in nature, a variation on the modern English–French relationship perhaps, with the latter seeing the former as a nation of tiresome pricks who would one day, with any luck, piss off and get over themselves, and the former in the middle of a grand tea party with puffy little scones and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, wondering what all the fuss was about.

Well, that’s unfair to both of them; but that was the basic picture.

While my father dreamed of friendship with my mother, Christmases together and general bonhomie, relations soured over the course of the drawn-out divorce, and by the time my mother and Mel were married (a few months after the divorce was official), a clear border had been established and my brothers and I travelled the concrete equivalent of the English Channel between our parents.

Contrary to the Sturm und Drang I enacted before Mel’s establishment in our lives, there was no great kabang when Lance moved in, as there might have been if we had lived with my dad full-time or been used to his constant attention. When they did live together, Dad and Lance continued to enjoy separate lives and social circles, and while some overlapped, there weren’t the sort of spousal arrangements and expectations I saw in the rest of the world. To this day, Lance has never had a particular role or label in our lives (although I teasingly call him my fairy stepmother), and in the early days he was just friendly and endlessly humorous, never tried to be a parental figure (clever, because two of us were teenagers), and he effortlessly gave our relationship with our father a lot of space.

Something none of us really noticed, but all appreciated.

Within his and my father’s relationship, there were no set roles or precedents. And the freedom of that registered with me even in my desperate-to-be-normal teenage state. Like many gay couples, Dad and Lance had separate

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