Well.... this is going to be a bit of a ramble. A lot of it is going to fall foul of lack of proper recall, and of 20/20 hindsight. But I have to get some of this stuff out.

I am struggling to come to terms with my upbringing and some of the things I experienced as a child. My wife can't understand, she grew up in a nice middle-class Asian family and doesn't have a frame of reference. Talking to her about this stuff just makes me feel numb, or like I am wasting my time. I'll say up front; I wasn't molested or sexually abused, and I wasn't raped. I am not sure if I'm just being a whiny bitch about it, or if I have a legitimate basis for feeling this way.

My father died when I was 15. It completely shattered my world, and I went into a tailspin for the next four years; whilst it was never diagnosed (before I refused to see a therapist or councillor) I would say that I was depressed. I used to think about suicide a lot, but never went through with it.

I am capable of being quite spiteful. I am also capable of having a vindictive and overtly cynical personality; intuitively I feel this is down to my upbringing.

I always felt like I bore the brunt of the aggression in the household. My mother - who I do love - could be a proper cunt. One time I drew a face with a biro pen on my bed and didn't want to own up to it, I blamed one of my sisters as I recall. There was lots of shouting, accusations, threats. In the end my mother took my pet rat out of its cage, put it in the bath and closed the bathroom door behind her. She then smacked around on the floor with a stick, implying that she was killing the rat. Of course she wasn't, but we didn't know that - me and my two sisters were in floods of tears during this entire altercation. Obviously I did something wrong, but I feel the reaction was way over the top and completely unnecessary. I can't remember how old I was, I want to say 14, but I'm really not sure.

She would do things that chipped away at my self-esteem all throughout my childhood. Whether it was dressing me for a christening or for a wedding, calling me a tramp and saying I always looked a mess. Or by constantly taking my sisters' side when arguments would happen. One time I drew this amazing picture of some weird ninja I saw in a dungeons and dragons book; actually I copied it from one that she herself had drawn. I showed it to her, trying to impress her, but she didn't believe I drew it and thought I was lying. It's a small thing, but I think about it quite a lot - I have a bit of a habit for rumination. Anyway, as I got older she would disparage me by saying I wasn't a real man, particularly when I was 16-18 and didn't have a job or any prospects.

My dad wasn't innocent in all this. The house was a violent one before he died. We were always in some sort of argument state, and I took a good portion of the physical abuse; beatings, sometimes with objects. I remember being hit across the back of the legs with a short piece of plastic that was supposed to be used to hang curtains. I remember one time in 1991 or 1992 (so I would've been 8 or 9) he beat me to the point where I was hyperventilating; that was the first time I had a fear of death. I don't remember what I did to cause it. Another time, in the same period, I got into a lot of trouble and took a beating for eating a packet of biscuits out of the cupboard. Other times over the years he would threaten me; one time he caught me smoking and told me he was going to use a cattle-prod on me. I knew at the time it was a ludicrous statement he was making out of anger, because we don't have that kind of thing in our little part of the world.

But at the same time, growing up... he was way more of a friend-figure to me than my mother. He taught me how to tinker with electronics, and piqued my interest in music. I've since found out that he was abusive to my mother on some level, but growing up my mother was just as abusive. Thinking about it now, I felt like my dad just had a very harsh sense of discipline, and even at that age I knew it was because of what he had experienced as a child. My mother? I felt like she bullied me. Partly because of how naughty and hyper I could be, and partly because of what she was going through with my dad.

But she'll openly admit now that she was just as violent, and she'll even admit that she nagged him into giving up the things he loved to do. Okay, those things he loved to do did involve drinking beer at pubs, where he would DJ at the weekends - this was the early 90's, way before laptops and mp3s... he used to have massive lighting rigs and big PA speakers, and LOADS of vinyl... but he ended up selling it all when my mother cajoled him into getting rid of it.

The way I see it - he had a family that he never really asked for, nor prepared for. He was escaping into his hobbies. That isn't to say he was an angel, he certainly wasn't. But I can identify with that, because I am prone to the same thing.

So after he died, and I was proceeding to fall into an abyss of depression and fear; I fucked the girlfriend of one of my best friends, and that all blew up. My friend obviously stopped seeing me. I stayed in a relationship with the girl for 11 months, falling in love with her (love and depression are not a good fit) until she cheated on me with some other guy as well, and it all fell apart.

Then one of my friends started trying to get me into a threesome with his semi-girlfriend at the time. Eventually it happened, and the long and short of it is that I started fucking this girl as well as him. She stopped fucking him in preference to me, and that caused some bad blood between us. Then one day out of the blue she txt me and told me she was pregnant - with some other guys kid. I haven't seen her since. I would've been 18 at this point, and I moved city shortly after; I was just so fed up with the dead end job I had and the failed relationships with women. I'd say it was at this point that I honestly did start to hate women.

Around the same time my mother had a boyfriend who was married. He spent a lot of time around our house though, and we clashed. One time there was a ruck. I was on the family computer, burning a CD of some music. He came into the room unannounced, and ejected the CD mid-burn and started to shut the computer down. I flipped and smashed the CD up over his head (he was kneeling down unplugging the sockets) and it all kicked off - bit of a fight ensued; actually more like him dragging me across the floor, because he was just too strong for me to really put up a fight. It ended when I smashed a window and got kicked out of the house. This was a day or two before my 18th birthday if I remember correctly, and from what I remember they were planning to move the furniture in the computer room around, and I was quite simply in their way.

I got kicked out of home many many times during my teenage years, and spent my 18th birthday at an aunts house playing Metal Gear Solid! This is actually pretty remarkable, because me and my sisters were always considered the black sheep of the family. For some reason that I don't understand, they all took a dislike to us. I think maybe because we were naughty children who misbehaved a lot, but I'm really not sure. So ... whilst other people my age had big and bold birthday parties, with loads of friends and family around to love them, I spent mine feeling alone. After three or four days, my uncle politely put it to me that I had to go and see my mum. She wasn't very receptive or apologetic, and begrudgingly let me come back home.

My timeframe is a little muddled, but I am confident that this was my 18th birthday. But I know when I moved city to go and study, I was 19. But I worked a full-time 45hr a week job for two years prior to that, so it may have been my 17th. I dunno, I'm all confused on that point. But it hurt me a lot that I didn't spend that day with my family, or that no-one cared.

So skip forward to today; because I didn't want this to be just a catalogue of perceived injustices. I think you get the picture.

I live 200+ miles away from my hometown. I don't have many links there anymore. My dad is gone, my grandad is gone, my nan is gone. All of my aunts and uncles basically never see my mother, and never speak to me. Very few of them bothered to come to my wedding last year, which hurt - but I put on a strong face when my mum spoke about it, because she has very sour opinions of all of them. She has basically segregated herself off from the main family, and only sees my sisters and her boyfriend.

New Years Eve, 2012. My mother and her boyfriend come to visit. My wife and I were very tired from the weeks work, and just wanted to relax. My mother and boyfriend wanted to go to a very busy part of our city; and I wasn't really up for it. Earlier in the day she had explicitly said that I didn't have to join them if I didn't want. Now first of all... she's staying at my house, allegedly to "visit" me and to spend some time with her son, but then she's saying I don't have to join them? I get a mixed message there.

Later on that day I call them up and say that we weren't going to go out and were going to relax at home. "Okay cool, not a problem" is basically the response I got. This was about 5:30.

At 8:20pm, they come back into the flat I live at. My mum barely says a word to me, and starts to pack her stuff. Her boyfriend cheerily says goodbye (again, another man putting on a strong face) and my mum hugs me without a word, and they just up and leave. A few hours later I called her up to question why she did that, and it turned into a massive argument about how she'd come to spend time with me, and that she felt hurt that I didn't want to spend time with her. I explained to her what the situation was from my perspective, but it all just went overly emotional on both sides and was a two hour conversation ending in apologies and promises to not fuck it up next year.

My sister has just had her 2nd baby (actually 3rd, but the first sadly died minutes after being born) and obviously they're all celebrating. But my mum barely speaks to me. She hasn't invited me up to see my sister or the kid. The only times she has spoken to me for the last three months is to inform me about my nieces birthdays, of which I am admittedly very shit at remembering.

But she never calls just to talk. She's not interested in any of the things I am interested in, and I think she secretly thinks that I am acting childish by even engaging in any of it. They're kinda the usual hobbies for men my age I suppose, I am in a band and am heavily into music. I read and write, and other artsy things. But I get the sense that she thinks I should just knuckle down and work a job like all respectable people do.

She forgets that I was brought up on creativity. I had people around me encouraging my drawing, painting, poetry, stories... because of that, it seems completely normal to me to involve myself (and I think the same for anyone else actually!) in creativity and art.

So in short; we don't get along on any meaningful level. It's all superficial, keeping the parent-child relationship alive just for the sake of it. That really fucking hurts to admit, but it is how it seems to be.

I'm at a loss what to do. Even though I am married, have a lot of friends, and never want for social bonding... I feel alone. I hide a lot of how I feel from the people around me, because I'd break down in tears if I had to do what I've just done here, face to face with another person.

I don't have a nice tidy encapsulation to end this off with. My brain is way too erratic right now. But all of the above has become kind of an obsession for me, and I do have a tendency to put the blame of current failings on my past. I know this isn't a healthy thing to do, but it's kind of instinctive.

I am a very cynical and sarcastic person. I have a very dark sense of humour that doesn't always go too well for me. A lot of the men of my age that I know, if I try to have a serious conversation about anything that I care about, it it usually met with sarcasm and light-banter level ridicule. So I usually just stick to shocking illustrations of depravity in order to make people laugh. There are a few people I can have deep and meaningful conversations with, but nothing changes.

Apologies for all the words, and the rambling. I'm really just trying to sort some things out in my head, and if you've been bothered to read any of this I thank and commend you!