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Family Alliances
Tim Parks tries to keep abreast of the whirl that is family life ...
How many combinations can a family of five arrange itself in? For starters, you can have all five people on their own, or all five together. Then you can have Mum and Dad together, or Mum and Mick, or
Mum and Stef, or Mum and Lucy. Or Dad and Mick, Dad and Stef ...I worked out thirty combinations, but I've always been useless at this kind of maths. I bet it's more. And in every combination the dynamic and the thoughts will be different.
When Lucy's off with her Grannie the older kids are relieved. They won't have to humour her whims, put up with seeing her pampered. When big Mick and little Lucy are alone, they're a potent alliance against Stef, but when Stef and Lucy are alone they're a ferocious alliance against Mick. When Mick and Stef are alone, Lucy is forgotten and now the two are plotting together against their parents. That much is obvious. We can hear them scuttling between one another's rooms upstairs, laughing and scheming, like the time they started a fire in the microwave.
And all this shifts slightly from year to year, sometimes from week to week. Like the cosmos, a family is a whirl of metamorphoses with no fixed points. You're inside it, both orbiting and orbited around, constantly changing in response to others who change again in response to you, constantly rediscovering yourself and them.
How would you describe your relationships with your family or friends?
Have you achieved reconciliation with a person or a group with whom you have fallen out?
Who was involved and, how do you feel about it now?
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