What family means
It is said that a family is a microcosm of an undetectable, ubiquitously present society. It is, in simpler words, the silhouettes and shadows of the larger picture: lived out every day, in mundane, everyday events. It is the headquarters of social-conditioning; that insusceptible, mercilessly nurturing force that’s at work even while we duck our heads in our first ever sonographic impressions. It is where our political and social realities first begin to take shape, without our blatant consents. A family, like a school, governs the counterparts of our physical veracity: our thoughts, our perceptions, even our unreadable cognitive expansions.
Different cultures have different concepts of an ideal family. Most, like the loquacious agents of right-wing philosophies believe the family to be an ideal institution and agent of security and emotional values. Families nurture our emotional sensibilities. Families govern our thinking. Families provide irreplaceable and incorrigible mental support. Families twist and mould our awareness according to what they consider acceptable. Or so the cohorts of the ideal theoretical organization of a family would have us believe.
The right wingers also tend to blame the absence of an ‘ideal family’ when asked to consider the moral evils and offenders of society: even the presence of underdogs, for instance, or the rampant issue of poverty. Single mothers are to be blamed for inefficient emotional development, and the existence of criminals is directly related to violent upbringing. Morals and the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are unquestionable and often unfeasible. In our cultures, families are to be consulted before every breakthrough, every coming of a new opportunity, every first step taken, every millstone endured. Families often decide for us how we do what we do, and how well we do it. Families even sieve our thinking and the way we perceive ourselves.
It is not surprising then, that those among us who disagree with or challenge the ideals of society have the hardest time breaking off the shackles. It should be easy to fight every layman on the street or at work. It should be easy to bury every societal concern in the deepest emotional pit. It should be easy to ignore the fingers that perpetually peep at our faces. To live our lives the way we want to should resemble a serene dawdle through a sunlit meadow. To want to make our own lopsided decisions should seem to the most determined set of us a mere cakewalk. Because, after all, who on this outdated doomed planet can stop me from wearing that short skirt and paddling through an unconcerned street of my own country without a care in the world? Who can stop me from taking that last bus on a winded, deserted afternoon? Who can halt my decision to become a painter or a respectable janitor for that matter, just because they believe it to be financially unviable? Should the concerns of the majority of my country stop me? Or rather, if I sat one wimpish morning on a lumpy hammock I might ask myself in a smoother frame of mind: Why is it easier for most people in the world to believe in the same ideals? Why is it easier for most people to deny themselves their basic rights and exceedingly difficult to do what comes most naturally to them? Why is it easier for me as a young woman to crumble the issues concerning the curtailment of my freedom and my right over my own body and concentrate instead, on the right tone of foundation for my face? Why is easier for the closet gay man next door who racks with agony every moment behind his marital sheath to remain married to a woman he probably secretly despises? Are what the conservatives warned us about earnestly, in the true sense of the word, right?
But if all that our ‘ideal’ families and societal agents ever succeeded in doing to us was butcher our innermost desires, we could have been the happiest cherubs on earth, gliding through our duties and cheerfully fitting in the slots that they labourously expended for us beneath our feet, and before the steps that they wait with anticipating breaths for us to take. We would have had no battles to fight then, and no moral cages to slash. We wouldn’t die each time we did what was most expected of us. And every time we became a little more of what our minds are injected to believe is right, we wouldn’t wrestle and wrangle within.
Perhaps the most pricking questions that consume our insides every second of our lives is this: If what our religious and familial institutions ever did to us was not mould us according to the frames they painfully built, layer by layer; but wriggle our breaths to fit into them so that each time we inhaled it hurt our very cores. Perhaps all they succeeded in doing was not to maim our desires to fly, but to mutilate our wings. Perhaps all they succeeded in doing was to immure a little of our dying selves (that never entirely die) inside dank, forgotten chapters of our minds. And perhaps this is why we all struggle with even the easiest decisions left for us to make. Perhaps, which is why, to live our lives exactly the way we wish to, the way we desire, to make momentary decisions, to take impulsive breaths, to dare to fail and to dare to be ourselves seem to us the most onerous decisions and the greatest personal revolutions of all time; that often the most iron-willed and single-minded among us can only dream of, awe-struck and envious.
Prerna Kalbag is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. Words, art, feminism and people are some of the things she is passionate about. An odd soul, she often lives in her own world of oddities and quirks, but has a sensitive approach to things outside it. She can be contacted at Prerna.kalbag19@hotmail.com and tweets @PrernaKalbag.