Family
- necessarily defensive, in part
Having had a few days to unfurl, stretch and flex out of the wee box I fit myself into to be around family, I thought I’d write some here.
It’s really taboo to criticize family isn’t it. Well, perhaps there’s not so much of a taboo against all criticism when great numbers of people have a good old unwinding, let it all hang out moan after being in many family situations, before the intake of breath that allows them to get on with going about their own lives. What is more definitely taboo though is to step away altogether, to choose to let go the obligation, the duty, the chore.
I’ve wondered if there are people who might read the words I’ve written and will likely continue to write about my family here and think, Can’tya just be kind to your poor ol’ folks (especially your mother, if you really do care about women), let them be and “love” them as they are for the rest of their days… that kind of think. Well, yes, I could. Probably.
If it hurts me (or you or anyone, really) to do that, should I/we anyway? How much hurt is too much? At what point is the hurt unacceptable? If I were/had been physically beaten, sexually abused, psychologically tormented in measures that would, or might qualify as too much in a court of law or on a psychiatrist’s couch, would that be ‘enough’ harm?
Who commonly decides where the lines are, and benefits from being the arbiters?
Do people stay in marriages, friendships, close relationships of all sorts, when they, their personhood is not honoured, is limited in ways that hurt them? Yes, a lot of people do just that, oftentimes against the advice of others who care about them. Why are blood ties, maternity, paternity so different and inviolable then? I’m pushing at boundaries here. I know that. I mean to do that, to give cause and pause for thought.
A couple of posts down, I spoke “unkindly” of families in a general way, which is kind of okay to do, in theory. Lots of us are willing to go there, in theory. It’s in the application of theory, in making a practice of it that lots of people will balk. Why don’t more of us go all the way, forthrightly?
My politics come from the inside out, from an innate sense of justice (something I believe almost every last one of us is born with), from lifelong questioning, so I didn’t just read a book or take in the words of someone, somewhere, nor am I having a delayed adolescent fit which it occurs to me some armchair psychologists, and there are many among us(not excluding myself at times), might suppose. I have lived far away from “home” and seldom seen my folks, as many people choose to do for greater or lesser periods of time in order to ease familial tensions in their lives. So, it’s not that I haven’t tried all the things regularly tried along the way, including just bearing it or messing with my mind in ways that might firm up the suggestion that it’s not all so bad, really.
Except it is all so bad. Socially it’s all really bad for lots of folks. And families, especially the stickiest most privileged patriarchal ones, are a glue for social psychic individual and collective ill, globally.
Relatedly, (how so it will become more clear further on) I saw excerpts from the Queens message -QEII’s Christmas day message that is televised in this country, if not all Commonwealth(code for British Empire, which is code for all sorts of bad shit) countries- on the box yesterday, excerpts that were all about the value, the valorisation of family. While looking at a picture of her own family, as she defines and/or experiences it, I was reminded that not all cultures define and experience family in that same way. Certainly, I’ve been raised, as a pakeha NZer, to conceptualise extended family as limited to grandparents, parents and children (who might perhaps be fortunate enough to meet some of their great-grandparents when they’re very young), so that when I refer to my extended family that usually means the parents of one of my parents, aunts and uncles who are siblings, and their spouses, of one of my parents, then their children who are my first cousins, and it is always just from and about either the maternal or paternal side at any one time when I speak of my extended family.
So my concept of extended family, somewhat like the Queen’s apparently, is limited to around about 30-50 people. That’s hardly enough people with whom one feels, or is supposed to feel a deep kinship bond, I think. It seems a very small number, and quite unsafe in many ways. Insular, oftentimes, at least.
I’m saying all this because I’m all for pushing the concept of us all, every last person on the planet having/developing a sense of being part of the larger family of humanity in ways that are meaningful. That’s just far too big for most people, far too much diversity for people to get their heads around accepting all those others as being like their own selves, and, of course, the system as it stands can’t possibly be expected to take care of all those people, can it. No, the system as it stands actually relies on, and has ways of enforcing Othering(our sense that many, if not almost all the other people are not like us(us being whichever groups we’ve grown accustomed to experiencing ourselves as part of), ways of limiting our feelings of kinship with all beings. The system divides and heirarchichalises(is that a word?) us, separates us into smaller, ever smaller groupings which we are then usually, and with good reason as the system(s) of families and institutions would have it, too afraid to move too far from.
The size of a group that is saner, more sensible and able to be more fully supportive of every one of us needs to be larger than what we each, most of us, currently has available. That it takes a village, a kibbutz, a tribe of some description to effectively meet our individual and collective needs has been in the news, so to speak, off and on for some time, and in our various ways of being throughout history the world over. I do think, even if I had that, a ‘family’ of, say, several hundred, I’d still be angling and arguing after that far larger-scale sense of what family is supposed to be and mean, so as to eliminate feuds and alliances of greed around resources particularly.
By the way, among the gifts I received this silly season was a gorgeous scarf given me by my niece, a scarf that would likely have delighted and also not been quite long enough to have strangled Isadora Duncan. It came from the $2 shop, which is the dollar store concept fit closer the more usual value of our currency against the $US down here. If I say that I could live without the non-essential beauty of the scarf likely created somewhere by someone very poorly paid will some folks just think, Wow, you really do hate your family!? That’s not it at all. That’s really not it, not at all.
Starfish
I like this post, and I agree the concept of family absolutely needs to be criticised. I of course approach it from the perspective of a person who for most of my life have been denied ‘family’ - and therefore when I criticise it I am most often suspected of jealousy. I’m always surprised at the shit people will put up with and excuse in the name of “family”.
Jealousy, eh? Such a commonly laid charge, an easy dismissal of criticism that is often learned at the knee, its validity seldom questioned.
When I read the part where you speak of being denied family, it occurred to me that I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are people who’ve not had an experience of family to set about criticising and rejecting and that some have had experiences so very bad that they would’ve been grateful for a good-enough family such as the one I grew up in.
I’m still going to go ahead and make the radical, to-the-roots examination and state that good-enough is not an ultimate good, is structurally very far from ultimate good because of the power wielded over the many by the few, as individuals first then by extension societally, globally.
There are some families, those who choose Mindful Parenting and Radical Unschooling among them, who practice different ways of being within their families. Outliers, I guess. Still, raising revolution is no mean feat, is something I’m all for supporting and encouraging even if it does little to nothing to change the social structure and institutions in the now, at least a few more people will have the opportunity to grow whole and clear.
“When I read the part where you speak of being denied family, it occurred to me that I hadn’t allowed for the fact that there are people who’ve not had an experience of family to set about criticising and rejecting and that some have had experiences so very bad that they would’ve been grateful for a good-enough family such as the one I grew up in.”
One womans sustenance is another womans poison, as they say. It isnt ungrateful to criticise what you know.
I was without a ‘proper’ family until really very recently, when I have been creating my own. But I have been temporarily within many families, and have been able to observe as a total outsider many more. So I feel I have a good position from which to criticise the structure and how it warps everyone within it, restricts freedom and denies respect and autonomy.
While its true that sometimes I have very much envied those with families, and wished for that sort of validation, just as many times I have been appalled, and glad I don’t have to follow those kinds of rules. In some ways a lack of privilege can be a liberating experience.
I hear you.
Um, everything else I started to write out of my thoughts seemed redundant, only a repetition or rewording of what you’d said, so why waste words, eh? I hear you, is all I need to say.
: )
[...] has been writing about family here, and her response to the class meme is here, with some interesting discussion following. I think [...]