A quarrel of love or friendship, a family heartbreak or a professional shouting marked their lives. This week, Jérôme, 62, writer in Tours, tells.
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I grew up in the big Parisian bourgeoisie, that of the luxurious apartments in the beautiful neighborhoods. I know that my situation is enviable: a privileged life, the best schools. It is undoubtedly imagined that behind the facade of the distinction, it can reign in these environments a real emotional misery. People don’t talk to each other. They do not behave better than others.
My mother was the child of this heavy culture, as I was in turn. Born in 1933, she was doubly uprooted. Her mother committed suicide when she was 3 years old, then she left with my grandfather taking refuge in Mexico for fear of anti-Semitic persecution. On her return to France, after the war, she met my father, also from the big bourgeoisie. My parents were made to be good friends, maybe lovers, certainly not parents. She was beautiful as an Italian actress from the 1960s. An expansive character, a beautiful hair. She was a cheerful, generous, whimsical woman, very much loving life. A melancholy woman also, sometimes dark, with authoritarian trends. “I have a black sun above my head,” she said sometimes.
My older brother was born when she was 20 years old. I arrived six years later, in different conditions: I was a desired child, among other things to try to patch up my parents’ couple. It was of course not enough, and they divorced. Around 40 years old, my mother started to work. She was of this generation of women who did everything to be autonomous, for the first time. She wanted to redo her love life, but she was flanked by two boys, and my father was not a relay – to summarize, let’s say he was making her check every month.
an expansive love
All this, I didn’t see it. I was too young, or too selfish. I liked the world revolving around me. I did not understand that she was not only my mother. However, she loved me. This expansive love, a little Italian, destabilized me. I did not find my bearings between a mother who loved me too much and a father who I felt that he did not love me enough. I was a lonely child. A serious illness had left me consequences: I was anxious, emotional, very nervous, and constantly in demand for attention. A “charming little monster”, it was said. I had developed a bizarre personality, a little mythomaniac, like a bubble of protection: the world did not concern me, I had recreated one in which I was safe. My second life to me.
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