You don't have to be loud-mouthed to be a bully.

 

I learned that from Mia’s story.

 

As it happened I had known Mia’s family in my childhood. She had a brother called Thijs (pronounced “Tase” as in “Case.”) He had been a high school friend of my elder brother. Our home was about a mile away from theirs, and I remember that the two of them used to stand on the roof of their houses, and practice semaphore to one another with big blue-and-white flags. But the thing I remember most about Thijs was his voice. He always spoke in a whisper – almost as if he was afraid that he might disturb someone. It gave the strange impression that everything he said was confidential and very important. I only once met the whole family, and was again impressed by the quietness with which everybody spoke. The parents were from Holland, and I presumed it to be a characteristic of the Dutch. I remember seeing

Mia’s mother once, and noticed that she was surprisingly small.

 

Mia was a petite, pretty woman. She wasn’t actually all that small, but the impression of smallness was increased by her close-cropped, un-fussy hairstyle, and by her habit of always stooping slightly, as if she were trying to protect something. Quite often, she could be seen gently wringing her hands in her lap. She had a cute face, and her eyebrows were always slightly furrowed, as if she were listening very intently, or trying to solve some puzzle. When she smiled, the sun came out, and she had a delightful giggle. Her clothes were generally loose-fitting, and never revealing. I noticed that she favoured light blue. I assumed this was to match her eyes, but later I learned there were deeper reasons for it.

And, of course, she spoke in whisper.

 

My wife and I visited Mia and her husband, Paul, in London when we were newly married, and spent the night in their little flat. I remember how sweetly Mia said, “Thank you, Paul” after he had said grace for supper. The next morning they took us to watch the Trooping of the Colour. They knew of a special spot where the procession would go right past us as it turned at the end of the Mall, and where we could see into the Horse Guards Parade for the whole ceremony. It was the only time that I ever saw the Queen. She passed within ten metres of us, riding side-saddle. It was very impressive how, as she arrived in her place and took the salute, the clock struck eleven.

 

We had very warm memories of Mia and Paul. So it was a pleasant surprise when I moved as pastor to Westville to find that they were members of our church.

 

About a year later, Mia came to see me – soon after her father’s death. As with many people who came for counselling, the presenting problem was depression.

 

Initially, Mia talked about her more recent unhappiness. A year after we had met her in London, her daughter was born. She gave up work, and immediately encountered some post-partum depression. The loss of work left her with the feeling of lost identity - all of her friendships in London had been through her work, and suddenly she felt herself very alone. She would walk around the streets with the baby in the pram, desperately hoping someone would notice the baby, and talk to her. Not long after this, they returned to South Africa where Paul had a job in Carolina – a little town near Swaziland. Now everybody talked Afrikaans, in which she was not very fluent, and the desperate loneliness increased. She again took to walking the streets, pushing the pram, hoping that someone would talk to her. Still intensely lonely, the depression was mounting, which put strain on their relationship. Paul had taken on a new partner in his computer business, and took him a six-pack of beer to welcome him into the firm. Mia responded to this extremely strongly and angrily. That was the first time she began to realise that she had a dreadful fear of alcohol, arising from her experiences with her father.

 

This clash threw her into a deeper depression, and she even attempted suicide.

 

Shortly after that they moved Manzini in Swaziland. Here they were far more English-speaking people – many of them expatriates from all over the world, but mostly from the UK.  The church in Manzini was very open to all Protestant denominations, and child-friendly. Here she could make friends with mothers of children the same age as her daughter. This was great and took away the loneliness.

 

Then in 1982 Paul became a partner in a practice with British partners, and they moved to Westville. Here they built their own house, according to his ideas. She had very little input, but loved all the wooden beams, even though they later became a focus for her thoughts when she was suicidal again.

Now, back in Westville, with Paul struggling for contracts, and her teenage daughter suffering from psychosomatic pains, Mia had reached the point where she realised that she was not solving her problems, and that she needed help. Though she had been a committed Christian all her life, she was now finding that God was not sufficient for her, and she couldn’t seem to find Jesus.

 

That’s when she came to see me.

 

Slowly, bit by bit over the next few months, the story of Mia’s childhood emerged. I’ve always counted it a tremendous privilege when people start to tell me things that they have kept bottled up for years. And when they tell me things they’ve never told anyone else, I walk on holy ground.

Mia was born in South Africa to Dutch immigrant parents. She was the third of four children – one boy and three girls - Thijs, Julia, Mia and Lieke – born in 1940; 1946; 1948 and 1950.

 

Thijs I have already described. As time went by, her father rejected him, and they had very little to do with one another. Thijs, like Mia, also hates alcohol.

 

The second child was Julia. As it happened, when I was 16 I had had a bit of a crush on Julia, but she was a year older than me, and nothing came of it. Julia was taller than Mia, and stood up much straighter. She had a ruddier complexion, and a high shiny forehead that spoke of intelligence, and, I thought, of defiance. She was a high achiever at school. Of the four children she had the strongest voice. Mia told me that Julia was very powerful and choleric. She had powerful hands and it was not surprising that she took up physiotherapy. She showed no apparent softness, and was the only one to stand up to her parents. She has always bossed Mia around, and it was Mia’s opinion that she bossed her husband – it was she who decided where they would live. It was surprising to me that one of three children should emerge from that environment so much more assertive than the others. I have since learned that this is quite common – one of three will be what is known as “the hurtful child” – preferring to hurt than to be hurt.

 

Lieke became a rebel. She was capable of violent outbursts which, to Mia’s surprised and chagrin, she often got away with. She dropped out of university when she became pregnant, and contracted a highly dysfunctional marriage. This rebellious behaviour is also quite common in one of the children in a dysfunctional family – even if it is self-destructive. Yet, Mia felt that Lieke came out of it all the least damaged – possibly because, more than any of them, she gave vent to her emotions. Of the four children, Lieke was the one her father wanted to stay with in his old age. In the end, though it was Julia who took him in.

 

It was Mia’s impression that Julia  and Lieke were her father’s favourites – he loved his second and fourth children, not his first and third. Rather oddly, his two favourites were the ones who rebelled or stood up against him. Perhaps he scorned softness and saw it as weakness. Mia never expressed anger in her home.

 

Mia was the most vulnerable of the four.  

 

As the younger daughter, she seldom had new clothes – she simply received hand-me-downs from Julia. As she was smaller than Julia, her clothes were always loose-fitting. She longed for nice new clothes of her own, but can’t remember ever getting any from her parents. One day, however, she received a package from her aunt. She opened it, and inside found a beautiful hand-knitted blue jersey wrapped in tissue paper. She still remembers asking her mother, “Am I allowed to wear this always?” It happened that the family went to a concert night, and Mia wore her new jersey. She can still remember running her fingers over the pretty pattern on the jersey all the way through the concert. From that day, blue has always been her favourite colour.

 

Mia loved music, and probably the escape that it gave her. Some of her happiest childhood memories were those concerts in the concert hall.

 

She was learning to play the piano, and was doing rather well. Her father was musical enough to detect that Mia had a good ear, and when she was eight years old, he took her to the Schimmel piano shop to help choose a piano for the family. It was one of the happiest days of her life.

 

But the joy was fairly short-lived, because her father’s interest in her dropped away the next day. She said one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever heard, “He let me choose the piano, and it was the happiest day of my life, but I don’t think he ever really listened to me play.” Actually, Mia felt that her father was the one who had great potential for sensitivity, authenticity, poetry, and love of music. Mia felt that she had got those things from him, not from her mother. That he betrayed and lost it was a great sadness. 

 

On her twenty-first birthday,  she received the piano as her own.

 

Mia spoke very warmly about the close relationship that she had with her Grootmoeder - her Grandmother in Amsterdam. As a child and teenager she used to write aerograms to her frequently. It was a very special relationship and she visited her at every opportunity when studying in Scotland. She was so close to Mia’s heart that when her daughter was born in London, she insisted on taking her to Holland at six weeks old so that Grootmoeder could hold her.

 

A great fuss was made when her mother took Julia to buy her first bra. But she never bought one for Mia, or made a fuss of her budding womanhood. Nor did she tell Mia what to expect with the onset of adolescence, so when her periods started, she had to find out for herself, and make your own arrangements for sanitary pads. It was a coming to womanhood not celebrated. From that time, Mia has had great difficulty going out to buy clothes, especially bras, for herself. Paul one day gave her a large monetary gift for her birthday, and offered to come with her to buy clothes for herself, but she couldn’t face it.

 

Increasingly my conversations with Mia centred around her mother and father. Interestingly, both had taken up scientific or mathematical careers. I wondered if this was in order to avoid the emotional side of life.

 

Her father, though very soft-spoken, was always talking and always dominant. At the supper table, if anyone ventured an opinion, he would contradict them and dominate the conversation, often belittling others’ opinions. Mia remembers pulling the serviette over her head, and continuing to eat undercover. I have discovered that it is very common in dysfunctional families for one of the children to become a “tortoise.” Mia has clearly taken that route. The trouble is, that the tortoise internalises all emotions, and feelings bottled up from childhood inevitably lead to depression.

 

Her father was also capable of uncontrolled explosions of emotion – especially when he had been drinking. These outbursts could be triggered by very small things. She remembers one day when one of these outbursts occurred while they were packing to go on holiday. The situation was so unbearable, that Mia went inside and hid under her bed, as she frequently did during her father’s explosions. (The tortoise again.) She would lie there under the bed on the wooden parquet floors, and find them cool and soothing. To this day, she has no wall-to-wall carpets in her home – she loves the feel of wood.

 

We began to talk about her father’s background. He was born in Holland and was a young boy when the First World War broke out. She never knew if her grandfather had served in the war. Her father never talked about it, and never talked about those years. He never talked about feelings at all. Mia  just had the feeling that something in him died during that war – possibly because of emotional wounds passed down from his father. By the time he was finished school, the Great Depression had hit, so he had very little to choice of a career. He became a chemist, and hated it throughout his life. He then married and moved to South Africa. Then the Second World War broke out. Shortly after Thijs was born in 1940, her father was sent to England, where he worked as a chemist in the British army. He was ‘trapped’ in England for the duration of the war and lived through the horrors of the Blitz. One can only imagine what all this did to his psychiatric state.

 

Mia’s mother longed for the time when her husband would return. Then in 1945 he was discharged on the grounds of health-issues, and came home.  But, she told Mia, when he returned he had “changed.” He became very difficult, and started to drink.  She described to Mia how she used to walk around the streets, pushing Thijs in a pram to give her husband “space.” I noticed the strange repeat of behaviour through the generations – the mother walking the streets pushing a pram to escape her husband; the daughter walking the streets pushing a pram to escape loneliness. These were some of the very few things her mother ever told her about their family life, and it was the closest they ever came to talking about emotion.  

 

Mia remembers the smell of alcohol on her father’s breath, and has not been able to bear that smell ever since. She remembers that he was very critical and cynical of everyone at his work and hated his job. He also hated parties – he she said everyone there was a hypocrite. And yet when he went to the parties, he was the life and soul of the party. A strange contradiction.

 

Mia has always hated parties – she cannot take the smell of the alcohol, and watches anxiously for men to become uncontrolled and angry. She had never been able to tell Paul that she didn’t like the smell of alcohol on his breath. She had also never been able to tell him that she suffered premenstrual stress for about seven days every month. I asked her why she had never told him this, and she said, “Because he will say, ‘I know’.” I suggested that she might be projecting her father onto her own husband, and that she would not know what his response would be until she risked telling him. A week later, she came back and told me that she had told him. And he had not said, “I know.”

 

Early in our time together, Mia said “I had a good relationship with my mother.”

 

It’s amazing how many people tell me in their first session, “I had a happy childhood.” I realised that part of my job was to help lead people to the truth, which was often the opposite. We cannot move forward until we recognise the truth, however painful it might be. I came back to this theme so often that one woman brought me a beautiful cross-stitch of the words of Jesus, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” It still hangs on my wall today. We have to come to terms with our past to cope with our present.

 

As time went by, Mia came to see her  relationship with her mother differently. She realised that her mother had in fact withdrawn not only from her father, but from the children as well. Mia remembers coming home from school many times, and wishing she could talk to her mother. But it was a rule that from two until four every afternoon her mother was locked in her study working out mathematical problems. I thought this was such a parable of someone who can’t solve the real problems of her life – and especially not problems of her teenage daughter – and so retreating into her mathematical world where everything works out. Mia began to realise that she had felt very abandoned. She realised that her mother had abandoned her instinct to protect her children from their uncontrolled and destructive father, and had chosen instead to protect herself. It was in fact a form of cowardice. It was very moving to see the great sadness on Mia’s face as she realised these things.

 

I discovered that Mia never played her piano any more. When I asked her why, she said, “Dad always turned it into a performance, so every time I play I feel like I’m performing.”

 

She went on to say, “I suppose I’ll take up piano playing again when my fingers are old and arthritic.”

In counselling I always try to avoid suggesting what a person should do, and I never suggested that she go back to the piano. So it brought me great pleasure a few weeks later when she told me that she had indeed started playing again. My own belief is that when we start dealing with the inward things we need to, the things that brought us joy start returning to us.

 

We talked about Mia’s career. She was a chemist, just like her father. Fortunately, unlike a father she enjoyed it, but, “I work like a thing possessed.” But it emerged that she had always wanted to be a doctor.

 

I asked, “Why didn’t you become one?”

 

She answered, “Because I felt that my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps.”

 

I asked, “So that’s why you became a chemist?"

 

She said, “ Yes. I took up chemistry to please him.”

 

Then I asked, “What did he say about your desire to become a doctor?”

 

She answered with infinite sadness, “I never even asked him.”

 

As I watched her excruciating pain when she said these things, it came to me that nuclear power is nothing compared to the power of the parent over a child.

 

I asked her if it was too late, even now at 42 years old, to go back and do medicine. She went away and thought about that for a week. Then she came back and said, in a very calm, adult voice, “I think it’s too late. Our finances are stretched, and we now have two children facing university education. I just don’t think it would be fair on the family for me to start major studies now.”

 

And so she didn’t. But I was delighted when sometime later she enrolled with the University of South Africa (where she was a staff member) to study librarianship. Her hope was to get into the medical section of the library and so work, at least indirectly, in the area which she loved. I heard sometime later after I had left that church, that this is exactly what she had succeeded in doing. I was very proud of her.

 

Sometimes people need a “parent-ectomy,” just like others need an appendectomy. There comes a time when it is necessary to cut away that which is causing illness and pathology. I felt that perhaps she needed spiritually and emotionally to cut off the bondage that her father had held over her. I have quite often done a ceremony using Psalm 118, which has in it a threefold repetition of the words, “In the name of the Lord I cut it off.” I can’t actually remember if I did that ceremony with Mia.

 

But I know that she did a cutting-off ceremony for herself at the time of the scattering of her father’s ashes. It was now a little while since her father had died, and no one had done anything with his ashes. Her mother had escaped overseas and showed no interest in doing anything.

I asked, “What she would you like to do?

 

She said, “I know a place in Rustenburg that has been special to me.  There is an old dead tree looking out over a dam. I wish that we could scatter his ashes there.”

 

I asked, “Why don’t you?”

 

She answered, “I’m anxious about asking my siblings. Thijs is so estranged from my Dad, I’m not sure if he wants to talk about it. Lieke’s life is such a mess. And Julia … well … I don’t want her to start bossing me again.”

 

“Well,” I said, “It seems you have a choice. You can say nothing, in which case you won’t know what they think, and things will drag on and on with nothing decided. Or you could take a risk –even the risk of giving Julia another chance of bossing you – and tell them what you would like to do. Don’t you think that saying nothing might be the old tortoise reaction again?”

 

I was delighted, a few weeks later, to hear that she had asked. And they had agreed. I was so proud of her.

 

As soon as Mia’s father died, her mother flew to Holland. It was as if she had finallyescaped. She only returned after Christmas, and after the scattering of her husband’s ashes was completed. Maybe her “escape” to Holland had been her “cutting-off” ceremony.

 

I have largely lost touch with Mia in the intervening years and I don’t know to what extent her depression and life-problems have gone away. All I know is that it was wonderful to watch her facing her inner pain, and taking at least some steps towards healing.

 

Postscript - 2019.

I have recently got back in touch with Mia. She is now 71 and having a  bad time physically. She has had breast cancer requiring her left breast to be removed. She tells me that in the literature, left-breast cancer is correlated with a poor relationship with the patient's mother. Lieke also had left-breast cancer a year ago. Lieke divorced her first husband and married a British engineer 16 years ago. She loved him very much, but he passed away last year.

 

Mia has now contracted leukemia. She writes: “I attribute the leukemia to working in a chemical laboratory with potent organic solvents, although I took precautions, but was immersed in such an atmosphere for 16 years. There have been eight incidences of cancer among my colleagues of that period, whose offices received air conditioning via the shaft that was linked to the fume-hood.”

 

So, it’s tough for Mia. But she has one particular joy. The Grandmother-Granddaughter bond is being repeated. “I have a special bond with my first granddaughter, Olivia Grace, now aged 11. Although she lives overseas, I have managed to spend every birthday, except one, celebrating with her.  The two of us chat at least twice each week on 'What's App.' She loves the LORD and at present we are working together through the Book of Colossians.  I find this a huge privilege.”

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