Wow Will was such a part of my childhood watching Star Trek. Obviously, he didn't appear often but he was memorable simply because there were so few people as young as him on the show. Sad to hear this all around. This also brought back memories of me being required to play piano growing up. I hated piano, performing (recitals), playing in general. I was terrrribbleee (still am) and was put up in lessons for 12 years…
This was my entire childhood. If I wasn’t constantly overachieving, there were threats of having me institutionalised (I never really understood the threat, given that I was already being raised at boarding school, how much worse could an asylum be?), actual privations (I came second in the year in some exams once because I had to do them from bed with bronchitis, and went home at the end of term to find my bedroom had been turned into a parlour), and the general gaslighting (Mr Hart is a very nice man, he would never do that (he is now in prison)) of childhood.
It was my mother, mainly, trying to make her own stunted and valueless life feel worthwhile. I forgive her, for she wasn’t much more than a child herself, and came from a small and terror-ridden world in the poverty of the decaying Scottish industrial heartland. She knew not what she did. She married a yuppie, an 80’s guy of the 70’s, and clambered onwards and upwards, putting on airs and graces you’d never think came from a girl who grew up in a trailer on a marsh next to a military base.
I recall testing this hypothesis, that it was about her, not me, aged 11, when I was Shanghai’d into doing a production with the Chicago lyric - she’d been pimping me out as a boy soprano with an English accent in Chicagoland, and crap did it sell. I decided to not tell her. Kept it completely under wraps while I rehearsed, told her I was throwing rocks at birds or something to explain the time, which was far more believable. Show rolls around. She’s there, at the premiere, because she has to be seen at all of this stuff, always. She was FURIOUS - I don’t remember a more severe beating from my father - that I had shamed her in such a way, that I had let her down so richly. The thing she was upset about, of course, is that I’d made it rather hard for her to take the credit, as she’d had literally zero involvement and everyone knew it.
We left Chicago a few months on, and I was removed from the school that had helped me go behind her back.
I feel for Wil. It’s a tough thing to live with, the anger, the absolute fucking outrage at what was done to you, balanced with the fact that whether you like it or not you still love these damaged shitheads, and your seemingly never ending quest for understanding why.
I understood, only in my late 30’s, the past few years, that none of it was my fault. I still haven’t entirely internalised that, maybe never will, but finding peace with my mother as just being the not terribly worldly or foresightful person that she is. I pity her hollowed out little life of gin and gardeners, but if it’s her crowning achievement, so be it, that’s her life to ruin. I got mine, mostly, back.