Family and Children

Family and Children

H

ell is other people’. Agreed. And the deepest part of Hell bears a notice saying, ‘Families only past this point, please’. When it malfunctions, as it often does, the nuclear family can be as lethal as a malfunctioning nuclear reactor. Every family is a potential Chernobyl and most of us are sick from the fall-out from the fallings-out.

            Were my relatives not my relatives, I would have nothing to do with then. I’m sure they feel the same way about me.

            The brilliant attorney, Clarence Darrow, once remarked that “The first half of our life is ruined by our parents, the second by our children”. One should remind one’s children of this apothegm, for it not only tells them what there are doing to you but also warns them what to expect. They will believe it, since they are already convinced that, since the first half of the maxim is undoubtedly true, the second half must follow. Although it will not stop them from trying to make your life a misery, it may perhaps make things easier for your grandchildren.

            R.S. Surtees (1805-1864) speaks of “young ladies” entering a room, “in the full fervour of sisterly animosity”, a phrase I cherish because it wittily describes something with which I am only too familiar. Wit can be a counter-irritant. We are so busy enjoying it that we momentarily forget the painful reality it illuminates.

            “Nought burns in hell but self-will,” said Meister Eckhart. Agreed! Caroline’s younger sister, Jane, invited her to her house-warming party, while at the same time inviting a known bad character, Susan, whom she had never met but whom Caroline heartily disliked. When Caroline told Jane that if she invited Susan she could not possibly attend, Jane lost her temper and retorted that she would invite whom she liked, since it was her party. After that she broke off relations with Caroline and her husband for ten years. Jane never saw Susan again after the party. See Surtees on “sisterly animosity”, above.

            Maria’s husband died after an eleven year illness, resulting from a stroke, during which she had nursed him devotedly, to the severe detriment of her own health. He left her a fortune of several millions dollars. After his death, Maria’s five bullying children told her that the money left to her was not hers but their father’s, so she should distribute it among them. Being accustomed to giving her children everything they asked for, she did so. Today, Maria is reduced to what for her is near penury. Last week her youngest son, a wealthy lawyer, to whom she had given the major share of the money, ordered her out of his house because she wanted to spend her last 250,000 dollars to buy herself a very small flat, rather than giving the money to him. The most he would allow her to spend was 100,000 dollars, which would have bought her no more than a hovel. Her daughter-in-law, on whom Maria has showered costly gifts and money for the last fifteen years, told her self-righteously that since she was such a selfish, greedy woman, she would never be allowed to see her grandchildren again. Perhaps Maria should have studied King Lear; forewarned is forearmed. However, since Maria’s mother made exactly the same mistake as Maria, enriching her rapacious children and then dying in poverty, it is doubtful whether any amount of reading would have enable Maria to avoid her fate, which was written into her genes.

            Amy, a wealthy lawyer working for a multi-national, serves fatty chuck steak – cheapest of all cuts – to her siblings and their families on the rare occasions she entertains them, assuring them that this is cordon-bleu cooking while privately boasting that the whole meal only cost her five dollars. She never sends them cards, phones them or gives them presents at Christmas, New Year and on their birthdays; but woe betide them should they do the same to her. This conduct is meant to proclaim her pre-eminence in the family, in which she is one of the youngest. Instead, it makes her heartily detested by all of them. Amy, however, is interested only in power, not in affection, which her career has taught her to despise as weakness. Yet her arrogant contempt for her siblings deprives her of both. She thus perfectly exemplifies Leo Tolstoy’s dictum that conceit is incompatible with understanding. Our careers often induce a deformation in our characters, of which we are unaware, like an old-time miner, hunchbacked from a lifetime spent crouched at the coal face.

            A demented American woman recently drowned her five children, aged between two months and seven years. While her action is horrific, it is understandable. The wonder is that more women worn out with childbearing do not do this, of only to get some sleep, like the servant girl in Tolstoy’s chilling story.

            Until quite recently, it was assumed that genetics played no part in family functioning. If the children turned out badly, the parents were to blame. This philosophy was eagerly adopted by the most narcissistic generation the West has seen, the so-called Baby Boomers, who attributed all their successes to their own efforts and all their numerous shortcomings to their parents. I know of a whole family of Boomers, all born between 1952 and 1956, plagued by what Ken Wilber, the renowned transpersonal psychologist, has dubbed ‘Boomeritis’. No matter what occurs, these narcissistic children are never in the wrong nor are their parents ever in the right.

            Whenever Dan’s eldest Boomer daughter rings him up, he knows either Christmas or the birthday of one of her children is approaching. Apart from that, he never hears from her nor sees her, though she lives only fifteen kilometres away. Nevertheless, she assures her father each time she rings that she ‘loves him lots’. He is not impressed, as he has heard her say the same thing, mechanically, to all her friends and relatives.

            Behind his back, Peter’s son, Stephen, a Boomer, systematically vilified both Peter and his step-mother, who had brought him up since he was twelve, to such an extent that his mother-in-law, Sarah, broke of relations with Peter and his wife immediately after the wedding. She had arranged beforehand with Stephen to do this. Peter had been invited to the wedding only because his absence would have aroused adverse comment and in any case, as the bridegroom’s father, he had to give the usual short speech. The proprieties were duly observed. The declaration of war was formally announced to Peter through a telephone call from Sarah’s husband the next morning, following hard on the flattering toasts and conviviality – all faux bonhomie – of the evening before. Such are the Machiavellian politics of the family. War is most effectively declared only after a treaty of eternal friendship has been signed, like Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. Molotov could have learnt a thing or two from Sarah. Mind you, von Ribbentrop was deservedly hanged at Nuremberg for precisely such duplicity.

            Some children are bestowed upon as a karmic punishment. This is accounted one of the most severe.

            An Irishman remarked to me: “Only one of my four children is a decent human being and he’s not my child”. I would have found this funny had it not been said with such sadness. All his children were Boomers.

            Children are sometimes born simply to revenge themselves on one or both of their parents. They are old enemies in disguise.

            “Our children will hate us too, you know,” Jack Lemmon once observed, in a film whose title I have forgotten. A remark of savagely convincing intensity, all the more shocking because of its comic context. Comedy can sometimes cut deeper than tragedy.

            ‘When I want to understand my family, I re-read King Lear’.  Though this is an unfashionable view, I suspect the play also tells us something about Shakespeare’s own family life.

            ‘When I want to understand myself, I re-read Hamlet’. Yes. But this is only partly true. Hamlet is the story of a dysfunctional family, quite as much as it is the story of a dysfunctional young man. “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”, is Hamlet’s comment on his own family.

            Scapegoating plays a vital role in society, as the sociologist, Rene Girard, has pointed out. One finds such human sacrifice in most communities, especially in families. One example out of the dozens I have encountered: Mrs M’s husband, Stuart, was never allowed to attend any family gatherings, because he had once offended his wife’s mother, a powerful matriarch. For over thirty years he was banished to his garden workshop during all family festivities, even at Christmas. His two children, who worshipped their mother, did not see anything wrong with this arrangement. Stuart’s hobby was collecting antique cameras, presumably because, subconsciously, he preferred to see both past and present through a cracked or fogged lens.

            Some family relationships are like eggshell china; the slightest jolt will shatter them. Anne, Celia’s younger sister, invited Celia and her husband, Jonathan, to her wedding. Unexpectedly, Jonathan fell ill and could not attend, though Celia did. Furious at this absence, which she construed as a personal slight, Anne cut off relations with both her sister and her husband for twelve years.

            ‘The human heart a fiery forge,

            The human face a furnace sealed.’

Blake understood us.

When my grandfather died, he left his entire estate to his widow, on the understanding that the four children would receive their share when their mother died. My uncle Thomas was so angry at his father’s action that he broke of relations with his mother for the rest of his life, even refusing to attend her funeral when she died twenty-nine years later. She, for her part, left him nothing. Logic plays no part in these family quarrels, many of which centre around a will, as Dickens and other Victorian novelists were well aware.

John obtained an invitation to an international congress for his cousin, Michael. Michael’s fare to Brazil and all his expenses were paid by congress. When Michael returned, he was held in quarantine for some weeks because he had forgotten to have himself inoculated against an infectious disease then common in Brazil. Furious, he blamed John, not his travel agent, for not having advised him to be inoculated, and has not spoken to him since then. One should never expect gratitude for a favour. Consider yourself lucky if the recipient does not turn on you.

David, who had always been deeply attached to his younger sister, was shocked when, in his mid-twenties, he learnt that she had secretly hated him for years, believing that he had been their mother’s favourite. As the years went by, her hatred for him increased, until finally she broke off relations with him altogether. Sibling rivalry can be murderously intense, especially between brother and sister. I suspect Cain may have actually been Abel’s sister.

Nietzsche said that “the son was the unveiled secret of the father”. A partial truth. Children are the unveiled secrets of their parents and grandparents. This applies not only to character but also to physical characteristics. The slim, sweet young girl who so enchants you may one day well be as obese and ill-tempered as her mother and grandmother. The handsome young man who has swept you off your feet may turn out to have inherited his grandfather’s alcoholism and his father’s miserliness. Carefully scrutinize the parents and grandparents of your future spouse. A lot of unhappy marriages could be avoided this way.

“The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted” (Byron). Transposed into iambic pentameter, this line could have come from King Lear. It has a Shakespearean universality normally foreign to Byron. It can stand as an equal alongside lines like:

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child.’

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM