Am I - as I suspect - the only MNer to find the whole concept of 'family' incredibly difficult?

[motherinferior]

Long ago, when I was young and had principles and wore lots of badges about my principles, one of my badges said 'Nuclear Family No Thanks'. I've always found the whole idea of family - both the nuclear and the extended - incredibly hard to stomach. I'm well aware that this is, of course, shaped by my own experience of family, which for complex reasons was something that my parents both found incredibly important and botched up spectacularly. The idea of 'family time' makes me shudder. The idea of 'doing things as a family' I equate with 'doing what my father wanted'. I suspect that DP has his own issues with the whole idea too (for completely different reasons).

This is not, as far as I can see, damaging my children - DD1 is frightfully keen on the idea of family, and I have no problems with her keenness at all. And I love them, and most of the time I'm rather happy living with them and their father. But am I the only person who finds the whole thing somewhat uncomfortable at best?

Brilliant post Frogs.

I had a shite family life with parents who never did anything normal.

Now I crave chocolate box normality with my own family and I pretty much live up to it (with occassional rebellious flashes )

I like my own family but can't really be bothered with extended family things. I love my own parents and siblings and get on great with DH's but it's just that I've always felt different and tend to please myself. We do visit and enjoy the company of others butwe've always liked doing different things to the rest of the family and when it is suggested that we all meet up for something I can't help think that after a couple of hours I'll be getting itchy feet and want to chill out on my own. Don't know why I feel like this and it's getting worse as I get older

oh ghosty - you must carry on those traditions - lmao!

I'll bet your youngest gets the smallest bedroom

we never 'thought' about family we just 'were' family

gosh, I love being part of a family..(it's part of the curriculum for dd1 this term too!) and that's part of the reason I'm struggling with the concepts in the book We Need to Talk About Family, because the narrator is so obviously f**d up by her own experiences/feelings about family/offspring/pregnancy that she finds it repugnant (only up to page 70 so far) and although I know "yes, that happens", it's so wide of the mark from my own experiences, it feels a bit "made up" or an excuse to get out of something you didn't want to do in the first place (ie did she really want a child?).

having said that I glory in all the different shapes/sizes families take on these days, and don't really buy that chocolate box image at all.

I'm reading "We Need to Talk about Kevin" atm - is that what you mean?

I was like you MI and I had that badge. I've ended up married, taking my partners name and with the classic janet and john family too, older boy, younger girl.

I think my mind started to change when my sister had children. My sister and I have had a difficult relationship for most of our life but when she had her children somehow it felt like a chance to start again. I love her children so much, comparable to how I love my own and there's no logic for it, but I see them and I see myself, my sister, our parents all mixed up into two peoplke who are themselves too. I have friends children who I also love dearly and have known from birth but it isn't the same kind of connection.

My children too are very keen on family and talk about their family a lot - they are lucky enough to have 8 cousins and it is a joy to see them all together.

But I agree with those who have said you put your own definition on family. For me that means not only my real family but some of my friends, their partners and children too.

dino, yes, sorry getting carried away with the word Family, obviously..

ha. how about "quality time" as a real cringe?

Families can be an incredible pain in the backside and after the summer I've just had with my family in its entirety (sp) I can completely sympathise with your viewpoint, motherinf.

why do relationships have to be labelled, anyway?

I suppose it depends what you expect from family and your recollections of your own family. I read a review of Janet Street Porters book about her 'abused' childhood - apparently - and don't quote me - she felt abused because her parents moved house!

one persons happy family is another's personal nightmare!

slightly OT but here's part of the review

I particularly enjoyed her recollection of attempted murder on her sister because she had 'grown tits before Janet' and Janet's wit and sarcasm is evident throughout the book.

However on the minus side I have to, like other reviewers, comment on her actual memories. After reading the book I felt that Janet Street-Porter had wrote her childhood memoir simply to let the world know how much she disliked her parents. It becomes apparent from quite early on that her relationship with them isn't straightforward; 'if anyone wants to know why I started to really loathe my parents...'. The problem is that this theme continues through the whole book and invades her memories of other things. For example when she visits friends in Cornwall she insists on mentioning that in comparison to her,her 'parents seemed small-minded dreary people who were satisfied with holidays in Spain and trips to the pub'. She also criticises her mother for always asking that 'I'd come home safely and take care, whatever that meant'. From reading the book I understood that to mean that they actually cared about their daughter - something which Janet is clearly unable to see. It seems as though this book as been advertised as a memoir of Janet's extremely difficult childhood, but this is definitely not the case. Probably her most difficult experiences were her parents uprooting her when she was 14 which I can empathise with (but to still be seething about it all these years later is a bit worrying) and taking her on regular trips to Wales to visit her family. How unbelievably torturous - I wonder why social services weren't called!

dino, what do you think about We Need to Talk About Kevin?

I was like you, I found it quite annoying at the beginning, but then got incredibly gripped by it. Stick with it. She does have some good (although profoundly depressing) psychological insights. I am reading it so avidly that I didn't bother getting a Guardian this morning - me!

I am pretty gripped already but feel "divorced" from her insights, iykwim. find the fussy, clever-clever language used a bit irritating. but i'm reading is slowly, even making notes (!) as i go along (it's for my book group reading). I've read a couple of fairly easy reads recently so this is nice &challenging.

JSP aside (haven't read it yet), you can choose your friends but you can't chose your family.

well, you can sort of choose your family, when you're grown up. It can seem hard to make the effort to keep in touch. Sometimes you only find that out after they've died (usually parents). I have occasionally found things out years later about family members which I never knew at the time - yet I thought I 'knew' them. For me, it's part of becoming an adult, when you stop seeing your family in terms of their set role in your life and start to see them as individuals. Think it started to happen to me in my thirties. And I'm going to go through it all again with my daughter, who may be a teenager from hell for I know, however cute she is now. She's going to have her own secrets, that's for sure.

Frogs, I loved your post ...

MI, I think there are really very few 'nuclear' families these days aren't there really? I mean, technically we (DH, me, DS and DD) are but in my 'extended' family (lol) it is a whole mishmash ... and I love it. I love the fact that I call my brother's ex girlfriend (the mother of my nephew) my SIL ... she IS family in every way to me. Although she and I were never formally related ... in that she and dbro never got married ... she and I have years of history, and she is the mother of my fantastic nephew and so she is family. Her daughter, by her new partner, I also see as family ...
Same brother ... has a total of 5 children ... by two women ... but only 3 are biologically his ... and they are all family ... and my SIL (the one he did marry) but soon to be 'ex' will always be the mother of my nephew and nieces and will always be part of my family.
We are dotted over the globe ... we got together for my sister's wedding this year and it was fantastic seeing the children relate to eachother. My parents had a do at their house for me to catch up with my mates and their kids. Some of the cousins came and DS didn't play with any of the friends' children ... spent the whole time with his cousins.

It doesn't have to be this sickly sweet image of family, it doesn't have to be 2 parents, 2/3/4 kids and a dog ... it could be 1 parent and 6 kids ... it could be 2 mothers and 2 children ... it could be a menage a trois ... whatever but it is simply the people we are related to ... we may love them, we may not ... but they are family ...

I've been doing some family history and many of my ancestors were brought up by single mothers or step-parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles with cousins (and numerous boarders) living in the house out of economic necessity. Maybe the nuclear family was just an advertising concept fashionable in the 1950s-1970s - now life is settling back in its old chaotic pattern...

I think I see family as a function, rather than a thing. For me "family" = the provision of a loving stable caring environment. It doesn't just mean me and dh and the girls. It's closely related to the concept of home, which, I hope, is an open place where friends and relatives are always welcome. I see our close friends, and their children, as a really important part of the environment we provide, as is Granny (my dm) and grandad (fil). Unfortunately Grandpa (my dad) has pretty much chosen not to be part of it. Family is not something that someone else can define or impose, it's not something that brings bonds simply because of blood. I think I'm waffling....

Interestingly enough - going off ona slight tangent - I was thinking about work as family the other day.I left to go on sabbatical for a year and was feeling quite devastated. Don't tell anyone but I cried . I don;t see work in terms of teh loving stable environment I described below, but I think it is - for me - comparable with literal families - ones that argue, backstab, criticise, try to get somewhere, but, for some reason always stick together

Good point muminlondon. Looking at how families historically were structured, the first thing which hits us in the face is the horribly high rate of maternal deaths. Every time a woman was about to go into labour, as well as preparing the clothes to wrap the baby in, she prepared her own and the baby's shroud and funeral clothes, in case one or both of them died. So masses of children were brought up by aunts, cousins, grandparents, step-mothers. Some children would have had had 2 or 3 step-mothers by the time they reached adulthood.

And then there was adoption - there was lots of it. Children were sent off to childless or much richer family members or patrons, and adopted as their children. Jane Austen's brother is a good example of that.

I agree the nuclear family was a comforting, cosy construct of a world where horrible diseases, poverty and childbirth which continually killed off family members or forced you to send your kids to another home for their own future welfare, had only just receded into the past.

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Phrases like 'family time' or 'me time' make me shudder. But that's not what family, for me, is about. I adore being part of my family - my parents, my sisters, and now the next generation. I love the fact that my sisters and I managed to produce three babies in two years (when none of us had showed the slightest sign of reproducing up to that point and one sister was infertile!) so ds has two cousins who will be his playmates in years to come. We aren't a traditional familiy though - my parents divorced when I was ten and my father's now twice-divorced.

I think my family has always been very important to us because it was so important to my mother. She was an only child and her parents died when she was barely an adult herself, leaving her alone in the word (apart from me and my father). So she felt compelled to hand down all her family stories to us. She made our grandparents live for us.

My nearest sister in age and I fought like (cliche) cat and dog as we were growing up. But any outside interference and we united immediately. And we were the people (along with my mother) who rescued our youngest (half) sister when her part of the family broke down. My mother is also very important to my half sister, even though they aren't biologically related. That started when little sister's family broke up because if my other sister and I were riding to the rescue, my mother was going to come too.

I love family get togethers. My sisters and I row and fall out. My mother and my sister row and fall out. I have been known to fall out with my mum. But we are also very close - there's a depth of relationship, of ease, of knowing someone so well, that is important to all of us (of course, it also means you know exactly which buttons to press to really hurt someone if you want to lash out). I'm glad ds is part of that and want to hand it on to him (not the lashing out bit, obviously).

Growing up we were lucky enough to have very dear family friends who were our 'other mothers'. Sadly some have died and I don't see enough of the others due to geographical distance. But I loved having other strong female figures in my life and learnt so much from them. Family doesn't have to be about biology alone. But for me, it starts with biology and then if you are very lucky you get other people drawn in too.

I'm with you on this MI and it causes huge tensions between me and DP.

I loathe the generalised concept of 'family time' and most times the use of the word makes me shudder beacuse I naturally rebel against others' ideas of the way people should live in units similar to the ones they live in. For this reason I will never marry, although DP would like to. I have a huge extended family but don't have much in common with most of them and only keep in touch with the ones I'd get on with even if they weren't related.

I was raised overseas and my parents were (and still are) real humanists, quite eccentric and always supported us in being independent and not having to do 'family' things. I loved this and cannot stand things like family outings, family shopping trips, family pubs, family Sunday dinners, family birthday parties etc. My immediate family do get together as a family, but not very often and we prefer to meet for a weekend in London or something similar, where everyone can do their own thing.

DP comes from a family which all live in each other's pockets - they are always in and out of each other's homes, involved in each other's social lives, discussing each other's personal lives, work issues and the rest. He, naturally, expects his own life to follow that pattern and finds it hard to accept and understand that the pattern set for me was a very different one, which I'm very content with. My friends are as important to me as my family and he doesn't share this either.

Each to their own and I love my family dearly, but the expectation of 'family' behaviour makes me run a mile. My annual shudder is Christmas cards written to me 'and family'.

How very interesting this is. I think I'm closest to Mum2Girls's perspective - we all live together and share a lot of things and try to get along.

I suppose the other bit of the jigsaw which was missing for me - and my sister, to whom I am now incidentally pretty close - was the kind of constructed friendship network to which Issymum refers. My parents just don't really do friendships (to the point where I think my father is probably somewhere on the ASD spectrum). As a result they are consumingly important to me and I can get soppy about friendships the way I just can't about family.