Families

Some days things just come crashing to you,  a bit of the past that jolts you as if a meteor struck you as you were just walking along the pavement.

It was really about some thoughts that I had with my second best friend at high school at the time, she faced a lot of physical challenges in her life but she had hours of time to try to understand me and we were chatting would of been early 1982 about tv and what we saw mattered to us.

You know, the kind of totally random teen stuff that actually in hindsight was really pretty significant for how I saw and felt.

Let me explain. On commercial tv there was a long running American tv show about family life across the decades called The Waltons that featured this extended family sharing lifes ups and down together in rural Virginia, and the head of the family John Walton Snr, operated a lumber mill and supplemented their income with a small-scale farming. They took in people and shared a lot as a family united, attending church on Sundays.

That's probably was much as I need to say for the purposes of this entry as I'm not writing a essay on the series or anything as it's what's in more modern parlance a "Slice of life" series seeing the family grow and change over time in accordance with events such as the Great Depression, WW2, the Great Society and Civil Rights  era and so on.

The thing Linda and I were discussing was Family: what it means to be in a family, our involvement or interaction if you like with with Mum and Dad, your immediate siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. The extent it is a 'unit' and all that.

We were also comparing and contrasting our own relationships  with our families to what we had been watching.

In a lot of ways she saw many parallels  between that of how she cared for them as much as they had to do quite a lot for her and the fictional family we saw.

I once said half joking to Denise one breaktime If it was like mine, then everybody would be off doing totally their own thing, with Mum trying to hold the thing together and me behind a chair on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

That may sound kinda melodramatic but there was and still is the lack of bonds between everybody, no real sense of feeling for one another, for me it wasn't a place of safety with one sibling who'd think nothing of verbally and financially abusing me which wasn't really helped by my being able to spot in seconds any outright lies he was telling to get more for himself as he felt hard done to and obliged to report it.

That's before you bring in Dad who'd explode at the slightest thing, throwing stuff across the room, propelling me in a chair into corners like trash, threatening to burn down the house.

You see, that's the big comparison  between what family was like for her and for me and to open about this really hurt.

This whole experience left a big legacy with me, not least a very strong feeling of longing, almost desperation to loved and cared for.

What I wanted so much was physical and emotional intimacy, a feeling beyond mere words of what it means to 'belong', to be bonded and have bonds that outlast their very beginnings, that provide emotional comfort promoting personal confidence and development.

A relationship that would teach me what I needed to know to get by with people, to be able contribute to it, helping me to stand on my own two feet as a grounded individual within the wider unit.

A wider unit that shared a common purpose, the raising of and looking after that family that was prepared discipline me in a loving, structured, affectionate way so fulfilled my role and expectations within it and our wider community.

I wanted to be...in the Waltons family.