Scottish-ness

I am Scottish. I was not born in Scotland. I have never lived in Scotland. I do have a Scottish first name and a Scottish last name. What I also share with that place are the myths of my parents entombed in their stories to me. All else is part imagination, part wishful thinking and often a combination of the two. Am I Scottish? If Scotland has a sadness about it then I share it. If Scotland is the underdog, then I am panting alongside it. If Scotland has fight about it, then I stand side by side swinging with it. Is it enough?

My mother was Scottish. She moved away from Scotland at the first given opportunity and then stayed away purposefully until she died. She spoke of Scotland as a little place with little people who had little minds. Truthfully she had barely a good word to say about it. Nonetheless, she did not once deny her Scottish-ness, she didn’t hide or ever try to alter her accent, indeed she would always claim her Scottish-ness. It is funny in a peculiar sense: she abandoned Scotland but never entirely rejected it. She did the same to me.

My mother decided to finally live rather than exist, as she claimed. She thought herself a free spirit and so became one. She married her lover, the same one she had been with for the final years of her Scottish marriage, the same one who kept her out in the evenings and made her absent on the weekends. As the youngest in the family, I was always last to know. I was never sure if this was because I was so insignificant or if I was just being protected. Suffice it to say I do not recall needing protection from anything growing up. I found out about this lover fellow by myself. I found the love letters in a set of cook books belonging to my mother, God forbid my father would ever cook. They fell out in a scented pile as I was looking to make my mother some chocolate biscuits – she had been working such long hours and seemed so exhausted. Of course I read the letters as a naive teen. I really did not think I was doing anything wrong, but how often has curiosity killed the cat. I regretted it. She certainly was not tired because of work.

My father was undoubtedly Scottish. He looked it, sounded it and was proudly from Alba. He left Scotland willingly, settled the world willingly and then stayed away with some effort. I cannot say he ever wanted to go back or not, he didn’t in his older Scottish fashion ever say. Such emotions were not to be displayed or discussed, it was just too emotional for such trivialities. My father did leave his family, his parents hearts torn with his parting even whilst being proud of the man being a man. He also left a football career, he had played for Scotland even, that is how talented a Scot he was. He left it all because he loved my mother, and my mother loved a dream, and that dream was that she wanted out. She wanted out of her Scottish life and later she wanted out of her Scottish marriage. It broke him.

Like a true Scot of just so many a stereotype my father took to drink and the drink he took to was whiskey. It was not, by my mother’s myth not the first time. With his habit of leaving already established, he also promptly left me. I saw him a handful of times after that, but only once did he travel back from overseas to see me. The other times were to show off his new and very young Thai wife, to cry (inside) over the loss of said Thai wife and the loss of his savings with the collapse of the bank in which those savings had nestled. I saw him as he stayed, sick and broken with my sister. It was a strange thing she did taking him in, she never did like him that much; perhaps it was Scottish duty. I had no place to which I could invite him to perform my duty, but then again I didn’t know he was even back until sometime later once he had settled.

When my father and sister fell out for the final irreconcilable time, he saw him only sporadically between bedsits and pubs, and even then it was by accident. I saw him once with my new baby daughter, or should I say he refused to cross the street to see me and my new baby daughter. Later he said it was because he was broke and could not buy her a present. When he left he had snapped my heart in two, breaking one piece. Refusing to acknowledge my daughter broke what remained. From that time on I only saw him in flashing memories, imaginations, somehow embedded in the myths of Scotland that I still hold now.

My sister, well frankly I do not know whether she is Scottish or not. I do not know what she thinks or feels about it. I am not she much cares for such things. She is the closed book of the family. In the end, I have to admit somewhat painfully that I do not really know my sister. It is not a fault. It is not blame. It is just so. I have an abiding love for her, but that is all it can be. Her life has always been a lifetime away from mine. She may be only six years older, but it was always six years long enough to make our lives more or less separate until this very day. As I cannot say much about my sister, I can only that she too left as soon as she had the opportunity. She said in later years that she had thought me safe, mainly because she felt I was my mother’s and father’s favourite. She did not notice that my father bought me things to shut me up when the horse racing was on. She did not hear my mother repeatedly tell me that she loved me but she didn’t like me, that she would never choose me as a friend. I guess adults don’t much like fourteen year olds which is why they call them teenagers; a veneer of respectability in a name cloaking their fear, regret and jealousy of youth. I too now use the appellation, and I too am probably driven to do so by the same petty emotions.

I do not feel any great bitterness though there are at times twinges. But I do and always have had a sadness in my heart that never quite leaves. It is a sadness that infects my mind with darkness, my thoughts are shadows in the night, regardless of their content. There is always a sense of loneliness, of rejection, of ‘unbelonging‘. After all I was born in Australia and have lived and worked in New Zealand, Singapore, England, Germany and now the United Arab Emirates. My home was always with my family. My Scottish family left me.

I have a new family now. It is a good and loyal and loving family. They are, each one, irreplaceable but with that, for me, unreachable like beautiful stars glinting on a canvas of empty darkness. I tell them that because of me they are Scottish too. But are we? Maybe in the end we are just as Scottish as ‘Braveheart’ is to historical accuracy – a product of our time that is entertaining but holds no great meaning. I have always wanted to be Scottish yet have felt I do not belong. Indeed I have always felt I am nothing very much of anything at all. As my life shrinks in time it seems I was right all along. Another one of those hollow Scottish victories that always seem to be followed by catastrophe?