Every holiday season I look forward to family occasions, but every holiday season I also wish we were more like the Kerrigans.
Darryl: How’s this boys! Woohoo. What do you call this?
Sal: Chicken.
Darryl: And it’s got something sprinkled on it.
Sal: Seasoning.
Darryl: Seasoning! Looks like everybody’s kicked a goal!
The Kerrigan clan from the 1997 Australian film The Castle always seem to me the epitome of family perfection. They feel pride in their bedazzling ordinariness. In the Kerrigan family, it seems you can be appreciated for the great achievement of just being you.
Darryl: Dale dug a hole. Tell ’em, Dale.
Dale: I dug a hole.
Of course, other people’s families always look perfect. Especially on television. It’s only your own that horrifies you. Like that George Burns quote: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
When it comes to family functions, beforehand I always picture one of those TV montages with families having cute moments to the soundtrack of a middle-of-the-road ballad by Foreigner or Journey.
But in my experience, families are often more like the hedgehog’s dilemma.
In winter, a group of hedgehogs crowd together for warmth. But the pain from their pointy spines poking each other soon causes them to separate, until the cold forces them back together. And that’s the way they continue, moving from one source of discomfort to another. In this way, the hedgehogs manage to stay alive but they don’t exactly cuddle up.
Sometimes it feels like a struggle to be both in your family and be yourself.
The writer Jodi Picoult says families are like wolf packs. “Everyone has a role, and if you act within the parameters of your role, the whole pack succeeds, and when that falls apart, so does the pack.”
The problem is when you don’t want to carry on being your role – the good girl, the swot, the sporty one, the black sheep. What happens then? Yes, I know I’m mixing my animal metaphors. Also, don’t wolves sometimes rip each other’s throats out?
But she’s right. When you step outside your allotted role, family events can turn into a bit of a disco bloodbath.
As Mitchell from Modern Family says, “It’s really nice to be liked for who you’re pretending to be.”
It’s a challenge and contradiction that the people you love the most can be the hardest to get along with.
Sometimes, my metric for a successful family get-together is simply that no one storms off in a huff – over something really important, like why Mum didn’t ask you to make your special potato salad this year.
One’s family of origin, the place you should go for solace and comfort, can sometimes be far from comfortable. Writer Margaret Drabble says family life “that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place”.
Without getting all Freudian on you, families are hotbeds – and coldbeds, I guess – of ambivalence. That is, we feel the presence of both love and hate towards our family simultaneously.
A therapist would suggest all sorts of ways to ‘integrate those polarities’ so we can accept our differences and still get along over the Christmas chicken (with seasoning!). Psychologists often talk about resolving conflict through compromise, which sounds a lot like a UN convention on human rights, when family get-togethers are supposed to be fun.
I remember one year when all my family were together for New Year in the Hokianga. I’d not been back there since my marriage ended and part of me was dreading it. But it turned out to be a wonderful ramshackle time of whanau, board games, bonfires, beers, laughs, dogs, wild swimming and all that good stuff. But it was probably so good because I had no expectations.
I’m no psychologist, but I do have an idea of how we can think about family that makes sorting out everyone’s scraps – like who Mum loves best and why you never got interpretive dance lessons when your sister got a kazoo – seem less like nit-picking drudgery.
My idea is that we think of family more like a collaborative creative project, an artwork that’s not perfect – it’s messy, it’s not finished, it’s a work in progress your entire life. The drama and problems are all part of the creative process. When you’re creating something, you have to notice whatever comes up without judgment, and you have to go through the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. Family is like that.
When a scrap is brewing over who got preferential treatment, the correct response is: “Let’s workshop that!” When you’re working on a creative project, the argy-bargy is part of the fire that fuels the creativity. So maybe this year, instead of having a family fight, set up a craft table.
Yes, I’m having a bit of a hippy moment. The idea is you can have it all but still be part of the group. You can work on your own thing – your career, interests, friends, personal growth – and still be connected to your family. It’s about allowing every individual to be creatively fulfilled, while enjoying all the delicious benefits of being connected. The idea is not to think you have to make yourself smaller to fit in.
Compromise doesn’t only mean giving something up, it can also mean combining the qualities of two different things. Think of family as a backyard that’s big enough for everyone to roam freely.
So the one thought I will try to remember this holiday is this: All our moments are moments before our death, and wishing well is the most fearless way to spend them.
Sometimes the only thing worth saying is “I love you”. Or maybe, like Darryl Kerrigan: “Good onya, Darl!”
