A Word in your ear

Significant Others

AJ, a bright young friend of 13, who is making up his mind about life, love and the meaning of everything, delights in asking me hard questions.  The latest was ‘Wendy, how would you define a family?’

This really is a question for today. Once, (whether it was true or not) we took the meaning of ‘family’ for granted. All you needed was a Mum, a Dad, two or more offspring and, if the genes proved benevolent, a pair of Grandparents on both sides.  

These days with high divorce rates we have step-families with extended networks loaded with sometimes stressful complexity. We have gay couples of either sex rearing their own families. We have ‘cared-for children’ cycling through fostering and institutional care who go on to create their own nuclear families in valid and admirable attempts to return to the norm.

Controversially the celebrity singer Madonna has recently acquired an African baby to incorporate into her family. With much more discretion, many years ago, our own distinguished David Bellamy set a distinctive family pattern with his world-wide adopted family now in its second generation.

So AJ’s question is pertinent: things are different now.

I explain to him that I grew up with a mother, the memory of a dead father, two brothers and a sister. One brother has, alas died. The other works in China and lives in Scotland. We don’t see each other but talk briefly on the phone every three or four months. My sister lives in the Midlands and we visit every three or four months.

These people, I tell AJ, are my blood family. Though I am not much in their lives if they turned up on my doorstep and asked for help or a favour I would leap to do it.

In contrast I am in close touch with my own children and their spouses and their respective families. These are my chosen blood family, in that we like each other, choose to be intimate, to know the detail of each other’s lives. We would still be close wherever they lived and I would lay down my life for them.

‘But now, AJ,’ I take a deep breath, ‘think of your mates at school. These could just evolve into a family connected to you by choice rather than blood. They are your ‘significant others’: people with whom you choose to be intimate, who stick by you through thick and thin.  Through the years they become part of who you are. Of course this is a much more fragile set up than in blood families because - without the blood tie - they can and do walk away.’

I count myself lucky in that I have friends who have been my alternative family for ten, twenty, and in two cases for thirty years. Although I am happily married I do observe that in these divorce-ridden days it is quite possible that such friends may stay alongside you much longer than any spouse.

I know AJ is on the threshold of all this, looking out on a world very different from the one I surveyed when I was thirteen. This is on my mind because in a recent novel[1] I have included a diary written by a thirteen year old girl in 1954. The world that she surveyed at the same age was so different to AJ’s world in 2001 that it might be on another planet. But, I tell him, although the world has changed, one treasure that crosses the cosmos is this gift of long-term friends without whom you would not be the person you are.

AJ nodded and said that was cool and he would think about it.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘what about jealousy?  What d’you think that really means?

Endnote

Young AJ loves his school, his friends and his teachers. He flourishes in that environment. So he was on my mind recently when I caught the Teaching Awards on television, which celebrate excellence among teachers.

We are haunted these days by images of school shootings, of feral, unschooled children creating mayhem on the streets, as well as stories of depressed, uncaring, even morally ambiguous teachers. Yet the reality illuminated by the inspiring programme is of dedicated, imaginative, energetic, humorous professionals who still do a brilliant job under phenomenal political, cultural and bureaucratic pressure.

Such teachers provide the benchmark for good practice and their presence in our communities should be noted and praised more regularly than once a year and more locally than in London. Perhaps the same newspapers that tell us the bad news about schools could have a ‘Teacher Of  The Week’ spot, where children, students and colleagues could draw the rest of our attention to an individual professional, who day-in-day-out is just as amazing as those teachers who won the awards.

I’m sure AJ would approve.