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THE GUARDIAN |
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What's love
got to do with it?
If the modern nuclear family were a dwelling, it would be condemned as unfit for human habitation Jenny
Diski It's possible that I'm not the best person to ask about family. Mine was a sorry mess, a ground zero of attempted suicides, mental institutions, dismal disappointments, destitution and love turned nasty. I would veto myself from opining on the subject, except for two reasons: the first is that those who claim to be from happy families feel at liberty to praise the institution, so I can't see why mere prejudice should disqualify me. The second is that I don't know anyone, even from families that seem to be models of the genre, who has got away pain and problem-free. If they have not been unloved, they have been loved too much. If they were not the first born, they were the last born. Coddled or neglected, the result is almost always dissatisfaction and probably years of psychotherapy. Of course, there's no reason why we should expect a pain-free existence. Freud himself aimed only at returning his patients to ordinary unhappiness. But at some point in recent times we have slipped into a conviction that a pain and problem-free life is what we are entitled to, and that growing up in the right kind of family is the only way in which we can achieve it. And the right kind of family is...? Do you recall that moment when you were told that you were found under a gooseberry bush? I'll lay odds that you can remember how your heart leapt at the prospect. Oh freedom, you weren't really one of that family after all. How often at night did you fantasise about being a maternity-ward muddle, adopted, a fairy child, anything rather than accept the flesh and blood commitment to being one of the family? I ask you to recollect these perfectly ordinary childhood thoughts because they fly in the face of our 21st-century assumptions. It now goes without saying that the family is sacred, the best way to bring up a child. Indeed, we think of it as the only way. When families produce damaged goods, we call them dysfunctional. When we fear that civil society has gone to the dogs, governments and moralists huff and puff about the loss of family values. We blame the individuals in families that break down, cite adverse economic or social factors, wayward parenting in a previous generation, collapsing moral and religious virtues, but what you rarely hear said is that if so many families don't function, then perhaps the family itself doesn't work. The family has become the sine qua non of well-being. Nice idea, pity it's wrong. The problem, as I see it, is not whether a family is good or bad, but the fact of the family itself; that false, fragile microcosm of benevolent government, on which unrealistic expectations are heaped. It's true that children have to be assisted in the business of developing into socially acceptable adults; and understandable that governments should wish to delegate the process to what seems like a manageable unit, yet over the decades the nuclear household has been asked to do more than it is able to accomplish. If a family were a dwelling, it would be condemned as unfit for human habitation. For one thing, governments are elected. Families, on the other hand, are totalitarian regimes and are difficult to get rid of. Yet while we expect our elected representatives to behave decently, we don't go so far as to demand that they love us. Love, that which will make everything all right, is the problem at the core of the family fairytale. It is the panacea. In the past 50 years, the family has been expected to produce love with the ease that it produces babies, as if love were as simple as the saying of it. We might demand that parents take responsibility for their children, but how can we demand that they love them? Love, it would seem from the real story of families, is not easy to come by. It's not enough to teach the little ones right and wrong, care for their bodies, nurture their minds, suppress your instinct to give them a wallop when they burn down the house, but you must love them as well, and love them right, or all your efforts will have been as nothing. This love, so carelessly, airily, demanded, is, as far as I know, undefined, except by a single sane voice. Only the late child psychotherapist Donald Winnicot dared risk a practical definition. He said that good-enough mothering was as much as anyone could hope for, and that, I think, tells us more about what we can't reasonably expect than what it actually is. In any case, this love business is on a hiding to nothing in our post-Freudian times. The psycho-daddy of them all made it clear enough that the family is a hotbed of lust, envy and murderous intent. Mummy, daddy and baby are each doing battle for psychic survival. We want, we desire, we rage, we are driven, but love, if you read Freud, has nothing to do with it. At present four in 10 marriages in the UK end in divorce. But this figure tells us nothing about how many of the remaining six in 10 marriages have one or two unhappy people staying in them because they believe it's best for the children. In 1999 more than 34,000 children under 16 were on the child protection register in England and Wales. A family is the best environment to bring up a child? Really? Look around you - the family we pour all our hopes into can hardly be called an unqualified success.
SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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