Can you inherit a fear of marriage? Cy fears SHE did from her warring parents. And now she's terrified she'll pass it on to her two daughters - after refusing to wed either of their fathers
106
View
comments
Cy Black, who grew up without a father, now feels that she has let her two daughter down by not marrying either of their fathers
My elder daughter sits in the back of my car, lost in the silent contemplation that so often precedes an awkward question. ‘Mummy, why didn’t you marry Daddy?’ she asks after a few minutes.
I cast around in my mind for a truthful answer that will both exonerate me and satisfy her; I fail to find one. ‘Well, we were very much in love and you were the product of that love,’ I tell her.
Which is fine, but hardly explains my decision to be a single mother. All I can offer is: ‘Daddy and I just didn’t have enough in common for us to remain together.’ The words seem lame; the reason inconsequential.
And as Isobel, 12, digests my answers, I am conscious that her sister, Nancy, ten, is listening, too. Precisely the same questions are doubtless coursing through her young mind.
Nancy has a different father from Isobel: two daughters; two daddies — and neither is around to help pilot the girls through their formative years, on to adolescence’s tricky rite of passage and finally into adulthood.
And the brutal truth is I am entirely to blame for this crucial omission from their lives. I was not abandoned by my daughters’ fathers; far from it: both of them were insistent that we should marry. But I was equally adamant that I wanted to remain single.
I reasoned I could cope admirably without a man cluttering up our lives. I did not want the complications, the compromises; the emotional investment required of a relationship.
I could support myself and my daughters handsomely financially, thanks to my career as an investment banker. I earned in excess of £250,000 a year when I gave birth to my eldest daughter — I wouldn’t need a man for support, I foolishly reasoned at the time.
Why was I so convinced that I could survive without a man in my life? Because my mother had done just the same. She and my father had split when I was just three, and he became a mere shadow in my life, ephemeral, notable only for his general absence.
Mum’s strength of character and determined, almost ferocious, conviction that men were extraneous shaped my life, my opinions, for ever. How wrong she was.
I met Isobel’s father, Jon, when I was 28. A fellow banker, he was charismatic with a larger-than-life personality.
He was 42, and in the throes of a divorce, and had two daughters from his first marriage. Looking back, I wonder if I saw in Jon the father figure I so conspicuously lacked myself as a child.
We dated for three years, but never lived together.
Cy pictured with her daughters Nancy and Isobel in 2010
I was, I reasoned, perfectly happy with a casual relationship, free from the challenges that accompany commitment. I certainly wasn’t looking for commitment from him. So when I got pregnant by accident, at the age of 30, I was shocked.
When I told Jon, he asked me to marry him, but I flatly turned him down. I just felt we didn’t have enough in common for a marriage.
RELATED ARTICLES
RICHARD KAY: Women fight for a slice of Winner's will 
Wild child or little girl lost? The mixed-up world of...
Share this article
ShareEven after our happy-go-lucky years together, I just couldn’t imagine a situation where you would need a man. I took the defeatist view that there was no point in making a lifelong commitment to him because I assumed — like my parents; like Jon and his first wife — I was destined to renege on it.
And so when Isobel was just three months old, I told him I was never going to change my mind about marrying him, and ended our relationship. He was, understandably devastated, but I remained pig-headed in my own stupid conviction.
Today Jon is living abroad in the Middle East for business. He visits twice a year, and Isobel meets him for a formal dinner at a top London restaurant each time where they discuss how she has been since his last visit.
Thanks to my rejection of him, this is the only template for fatherhood she knows.
Cy (right) as a baby with her older sister in 1970. She said her own parents split when she was three
While he is loving, there is no replacement for a constant paternal figure in a little girl’s life. I harbour so many regrets, so much guilt, about failing to give our relationship a proper chance.
Regardless of how I felt about Jon at the time of our split, I utterly loved being a mummy. Having Isobel was the making of me — I just adored her so much. Her little legs, her gummy smile, her sweet smell ... she satisfied a deep maternal urge I didn’t even know I had.
So enamoured was I that I concluded that I desperately wanted another child, and fast. But I still didn’t want a man to go with the baby.
Then I met Max, a friend of a friend, when Isobel was two. He was 18 years my senior and worked in the oil business. I fell for him instantly — he was the life and soul of the party.
Within five months of meeting him, I was pregnant. And no, it wasn’t an accident this time. We both wanted a baby together, but as Max had five children with two ex-wives, my guard was well and truly up.
A man to father a child was necessary, but a husband, in my mind, was still extraneous, and anyway, Max, because of his track record, was perhaps the last person who could have worn down my rock-hard layers of distrust.
I gave birth to Nancy in January 2004 and Max asked me to marry him shortly afterwards. I said no, instantly. The very characteristics that were so appealing at first had quickly cemented my certainty that no man was worth the risk. Max was so lively, so outgoing, that I’d convinced myself that he couldn’t be trusted.
Despite his insistence that he wanted to be with me, I convinced myself my fears were rational. I became haunted by what I saw as the inevitability of heartache, and, eventually, when Nancy was three, I walked away. Easier to bail out, I thought, then hang around.
Cy holding one of her daughters in 2004, while the other sits in the background. She said: 'Mum's strength of character and determined, almost ferocious, conviction that men were extraneous shaped my life, my opinions, for ever. How wrong she was'
Nancy saw her father around four or five times a year when I would fly with her to a yacht in the Mediterranean to see him for a week or two at a time — hardly normal life. Tragically, two years ago Max passed away of lung cancer. He was just 60. Nancy has clung to these memories of her father, no matter how fleeting they were.
Looking back, I wince at how easily I cast these two good men away and can only conclude that I have let both my daughters down badly. Simply, I have failed as a mother because I have provided neither of them with the nuclear family they deserve.
It doesn’t take the expertise of a psychologist to reason why: I believe the roots of my own inadequacy as a parent, my inability to trust and settle, lie in my upbringing. The lack of a father in my childhood has made me an inadequate mother.
My parents — both of them professional, resourceful and intelligent — had a particularly rancorous divorce. I did not see my father — a university lecturer who was remote and insular at the best of times — for five long years.
Materially, I had everything I could have wished for as a child. I grew up in a large, four-bedroom detached house in Hertfordshire. My elder sister, Poppy, and I had our own horses and we went to a private school nearby. You might imagine that the trauma of a parental separation could not impinge too much on a child of only three. But, God, it did.
She writes: 'I see daily examples of the vignettes of family life I am denying my girls'
Today, I can see that my father’s absence in these precious early years of development caused irreparable and deep-rooted damage.
For it skewed my view of how a family functions: I grew up believing that fathers play peripheral roles in their children’s lives; that they are routinely absent from them, and that mothers muddle through alone.
My elder sister, too, absorbed this message: significantly, like me she has not married, though she is childless. She, too, is unable to trust men.
I felt my father’s absence acutely. I remember only too well that friends’ fathers would pick them up from school, greeting them with big bear hugs, and gentle questions about their day. My father never came to get me. It was hugely upsetting, and I became a self-contained little girl.
When I did finally meet my father again, I was eight. My sister and I had begged to meet him again, but the nerves before our meeting were overwhelming. We were like strangers and spoke, rather stiltedly, about school and not much else.
No wonder, then, that throughout my teens our reunions were few and awkward. Dad was like a distant intellectual uncle I had nothing to say to, and who had nothing to say to me. Mum would drop me off at his house. As they didn’t speak, I’d walk up the long drive by myself.
The afternoon would pass with polite conversation, a game of chess, or he’d ask me to read a classic novel aloud. Our conversation never strayed onto our emotions. Small talk was always the order of the day.
As Dad became ever more distant, at the same time, my mother, a strong and resourceful woman who worked as a teacher, brought up my sister and me without any hands-on help.
She never remarried. Watching her, I learned that you didn’t need a man to be successful, to be happy.
And the message of self-sufficiency she passed on to me was reinforced at my independent all-girls’ school where academic success was prized over settling down and raising a family. We were taught to aspire: to the best university and fulfilling careers.
And so it was that I joined the legion of modern women who believe they do not need men in their lives. Only now, at 42, single mother to two young girls, am I beginning to realise just how wrong I was.
I see daily examples of the vignettes of family life I am denying my girls. If I see dads playing catch in the park with their children, I feel a pang of regret. Proud fathers cheering from the sidelines at school sports days bring a thin veil of tears to my eyes. Friends who tell me of their children having ‘daddy-daughter’ days out together must surely have noted a hardening in my voice, and a brisk end to the conversation.
And there was no one to share my pride with as I sat on my own at the end of school prize-giving ceremony a few weeks ago.
Cy fears that her 'pattern of destructive behaviour will 'continue to resonate down the generations ' she writes 'my daughters will take their lead from me - unless I can arrest it in time'
The truth is while I have been able to give my children a privileged upbringing — they are both at top private schools and we live in a £1.5million three-bedroom apartment in an exclusive enclave of West London — I alone can never fill the dad-sized gap in their lives.
Not only that, but I have denied them the working template — the outline of how a functioning family rubs along on a daily basis — on which they should base their future lives.
They do not know how a mother and father sometimes argue, agree to compromise and make up.
They have not witnessed those easy daily conversations — and silences — that take place between two grown-ups who love each other and have learned, over years, to live together companionably.
They do not know what it is to share their small, daily triumphs and disappointments with two people.
And no matter how thinly I spread myself, or how assiduously I divide my time between them, I cannot be both mum and dad to them.
Since discarding my daughters’ fathers, I’ve had a few other relationships and even two more proposals of marriage. All my partners were eminently good prospects: wealthy, attractive men with good jobs. So it seems almost perverse that I should choose, one by one, to discard them.
But it seems I am unable to sustain a relationship beyond a couple of years. I reach that point when the passionate physicality has subsided, and a deeper commitment is expected of me. And this is when I bolt for the hills.
I recognise, as a mum, that I am doubly irresponsible. I introduce into my children’s lives a procession of new men, and then I abandon them.
This pattern of destructive behaviour will, I fear, continue to resonate down the generations — my daughters will take their lead from me — unless I can arrest it in time.
Today, when I speak to my own mother about Dad’s absence and the effect it had on me, Mum is brought close to tears. ‘I feel guilty, Cy,’ she says. ‘I wish things had been different.’
And so do I. An absent father has turned me into the woman I am: an abject failure at relationships. In effect, a less than adequate mum. The consequences of Dad’s premature departure from my young life have been far-reaching; so entrenched, in fact, that they have become the central theme of a novel I have written.
My exercise in self-analysis, meanwhile, continues. I know now why I — despite my affluence, my intelligence, my good looks — am facing middle-age as a single mum.
The answer is that I have inherited, not only an inability to commit, but also a fear that history will repeat itself and any long-term relationship I embark on will end in tears and recrimination.
I am convinced that divorced parents breed children who divorce. Conversely those who watch their parents weather the vicissitudes of marriage and stay together, go on themselves to have marriages that endure.
So the self-destructive cycles are perpetuated, just as the successful ones are.
Outwardly, my daughters appear happy. But I’m all too conscious of the damage my selfish choices might have inflicted upon them. I am painfully aware they might look enviously on friends where dads are a valued part of their lives. I am too scared to ask if they are, fearing the answer and the confirmation of what I have done to them.
Young as they are, I try to instill in them the value of marriage; the fulfilment of commitment, the abiding joys of sharing life with one partner. But will they listen? The fact is, I doubt it. Children learn from example and precedent. And mine, I am all too aware, has been parlously lacking.
- Some names have been changed. False Gods, The Ecstasy by Cy Black is available from Amazon.
INTERVIEW BY ALISON SMITH-SQUIRE
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pa3IpbCmmZmhe6S7ja6iaJ6Voq6quI6aqa2hk6Gybn6ScmxrbGdkkLp5oaWYnKNdeK6vecinn56qmal6p7HAq2SmmaKntqKzxGZ6smWkmr%2BztcWinJ1lo52yrbiMqZisq12Zrrazx62cq6tencGuuA%3D%3D