Home
needs to be a place where will feel we belong, that it is our own territory.
The
old adage “The Englishman’s home is his castle”, expresses well how crucial to
the concept of home is both belonging and territory. The Duchess of
Northumberland writes ironically of how little like a home
You
do not have to be expected to live in a castle to feel that the place in which
you live is not your territory and therefore not truly your home. When a young
couple set up their own home, often they are suddenly surrounded by family and
friends eager to tell them how to run it. In some cases, these people in fact
want to run it themselves. Often people suddenly propose that they will come
over and trim your hedges, paint your walls or replace your seat covers, with
the rider that you will “of course” be delighted to accept. Others see a
welcome chance to offload some Stuff from their own homes by suggesting that
you would “of course” love to have, say,
Great Aunt Alice’s comfy chair, since she made the cover herself and “we just must
keep it in the family”. Often such offers are intended to be well meaning
(or at least the proponents at a conscious level convince themselves that they
are) but the net effect can be devastating. One friend and her husband with
three children had never really plucked up the courage to fend off her mother
who from an early stage in their marriage had turned up whenever she felt like
it to “help”, putting on the washing, “tidying up” and generally doing all
those things she “knew” needed doing. It was not their territory, but rather a
place where the expectations and behaviour were set by someone else. Neither
spouse felt that where they lived was truly their home.
Virginia
Ironside writes “I
know its irresistible sometimes. Once, when
staying with a scrupulously clean friend, I was tempted, when he was out, to
clean the only dirty thing in the house- a banister that was covered with the
black grease that comes of too many dirty hands clutching at it with a wipe
from my handbag. Horror! The little bit I attacked came up gleaming clean- and
I suddenly realised that I had gone too far. Try as I might I couldn’t dirty it
up again. I cunningly hung a cardigan over that bit of the banister during the
rest of my stay and just hoped he’d never notice my invasive and, frankly, bad-
mannered attempt to clean up his home…Our homes, even ramschackle
cottages …are our own personal space. If someone tinkers around with them.. it can feel as upsetting as
finding a bloke has sneaked his hand up your skirt.” (TI6 23rd Oct)
In the course of the same article, contributer Mary Nolze writes “When my mother-in-law used to fold my
children’s clothes with geometrical precision, it was like a stab in the heart
to me”.
If
this kind of behaviour is not dealt with the emotional effects can be
devastating.
Dr
Thomas Verney writes of the research Dr Dennis Stott
carried out in the early seventies into stress in pregnant women and its effect
on their children. ”No ill effects ..were apparent in
the offspring of women who had suffered fairly intense but brief stress during
pregnancy, such as witnessing a violent dog fight..[or
even] having a child of hers run away for a day..[but]
Dr Stott’s data showed that prolonged upsets that did not directly threaten a
woman’s emotional security, such as the illness of a close relative, had little
or no effect on her unborn child, while long
term personal stresses frequently
did. More often than not, these were created by tension with a close family
member- usually a husband, but in some instances an in-law. According to Dr
Stott, aside from being personal, two other things characterised these
stresses. “They tended to be continuous or liable to erupt at any time and they
were incapable of resolution” (SLUB p33) Naomi Stadlen
comments; “People who have been schooled into never making a fuss or never to
burden other people with their troubles tend to withdraw when they feel
unhappy. They feel safer alone, where they can” lick their own wounds” as the
saying goes, to comfort them. …Another way of managing distress is to tell
oneself “It doesn’t matter”. ”Its no big deal.”I don’t mind at all”. If this is a denial of a person’s
true feelings, the person may feel calm, but at the price of shutting down a
level of ordinary human sensitivity”. (WMD P79)
There
are few more devastating stresses than that of feeling that you are not truly
at home in your home. When a family finds itself in the situation faced by my
friend, it can seriously undermine parent’s authority and self confidence and
result in acute stress. Stress of this kind, ie
caused by the behaviour of family members or friends, which
you feel you cannot challenge and which undermines your emotional security,
will have a very negative effect on your family life, whether or not you are
expecting a baby. As a nation, English people do not like making a fuss and
challenging such behaviour will
inevitably make a fuss, involving as it will the questioning of dearly held
assumptions as to what is acceptable behaviour and where the balance of power
lies. The price of pretending that everything is “fine” however,
is high and the rewards of tackling the problem head on are great, both for the
family itself and for the people offering “help”. Taking such offers at their
face value and explaining clearly at an early stage what your expectations are
as a family, what you find helpful and what you do not, clears the air and avoids potential relationship problems from
becoming chronic. It restores a sense of territory over your home and makes it
an oasis of peace in a world full of competing and raucous demands on your
family’s time, space and culture.
It
also makes offers of genuine help
more likely. To be genuine and supportive an offer needs to have three
important features; it must be an offer of something the proposer,
having studied the family’s situation and having given it some thought, has
reason to believe will be accepted with thanks by the family (where a busy
family clearly enjoys spending time together at weekends offering to “take the
children off your hands because of course you will want time to yourselves” is
unlikely to be perceived as helpful). Secondly, the offer needs to be made in
such a way that the family has time to consider it. Face to face offers made
with the assumption that they will be accepted, especially in front of the
children, do not meet this criterion. An offer of “You would , of course , love me to make you one
of my special rabbit stews next weekend, wouldn’t you?” to a vegetarian family
from Auntie Mabel eliciting cries of curiosity and enthusiasm from the
children, is unlikely to endear the said Aunt to her sister or
brother-in-law. Thirdly, there must
genuinely be the possibility of declining the offer without anyone being made
to feel embarrassed or mean-spirited. A quiet aside to a mother or father of “
I have a series of children’s books at home all about sea life that Peter might
like, but I quite understand that you may already have more than enough books.
Let me know what you think.” is likely to elicit a warm hearted and
appreciative response whether or not the parent decides to accept. Such offers
strengthen relationships as well as making a house a genuine home. The basis of
such offers is empathy. Also, as potential givers we need to remind ourselves
that the giver is blessed more than he who receives; if we remember that
whoever accepts our offer of help is doing us more of a favour than we are to
them by offering, it will be hard to step on any toes, even unintentionally.
When we approach another family we do well to remind ourselves that we tread on
holy ground.
From
a young family’s point of view relationship challenges may seem insoluble, but
given courage and trust between the
spouses, they are usually capable of resolution. The Duchess of Northumberland
felt very despondent about her situation, with the weight of a long history of
her husband’s family tradition weighing upon her, together with all its related
assumptions. In fact her husband obeyed the golden rule; he remembered that, in
the words of the Gospel once you are married you leave father and mother and cleave to your spouse.” My husband saw
what was happening and he said; “Look, don’t worry; it isn’t going to be like
this forever. I promise you we can change things…..Ten years later, people say
that what they love about Alnwick is that it feels
like a family home…one of the first things I did was to make a room where we
could live as a family, so I made an enormous kitchen...we opened up some
places, removed doors, then I got very modern lighting and ..it
works. At that point I realised that you can actually do anything if you know
what you like. It also taught me that experts are not always right and that you
shouldn’t worry about what people think of you” (“Home” by Stafford Cliff,
published by Quadrille and quoted in the Independent