As the country toughens, so too do the psyche and the family – hopefully, not too much
I DON’T KNOW about you, but resolutions didn’t get a look in here this year. Without consciously realising it, we seem to have taken up a war footing. Resolutions are for peace time, when things are good and you aspire for advancement. When you’re corralling what you have, determined to hang onto it, there isn’t much room for aspirations.
It’s not like we have it bad. Neither of us has lost a job, our home is under no threat and we’re all healthy. There is no real difference between this New Year and any of the recent ones just passed.
If anything, times are slightly easier. Elder and younger child aren’t so young anymore. They go to school most days, hang out with their friends, and, when they’re not pestering me to be fed or entertained, they’re self-contained. They rip lumps out of one another and expect the moon on a stick, but that’s their job. They’re kids.
There is no concrete reason why our unit should feel threatened – and yet, there is a sense of discomfort. Of course, the economy is a disaster and Brian Lenihan is rooting in our pockets, but there is nothing to suggest, fortunately, within our micro-community, that our situation will alter in any way dramatically in the next 12 months. Yet there it is, that discomfort.
I just had a school reunion. Fantastic. Lots of “D’you remember when. . . ?” Very little work talk. Nobody banging on about essential investments in the Far East, nobody chewing the ears off you about the value of their house, nobody trying to convince you to buy an apartment in Bulgaria (just three hours by yak from Sofia). For that at least I am grateful to the newly adjusted world order; old friends can meet and drink beer without any need to provide bank statements.
Yet there was also an air of concern, an unsaid wondering if everything will work out.
We haven’t had that in a while. In the golden years, there was the belief that we were entitled to whatever we wanted – didn’t we deserve it? And, while our situations may not be dire, we all already have our personal war stories. Stories of repossessions and ailing health, stories of people we know whose lives have changed utterly. We know that if it can happen to them, surely it can happen to us.
There is a fatalist element to this. If we could convince ourselves we were financial superstars simply because the value of our house had tripled over a period of years, surely we can now over-dramatise and claim the end is nigh because the value of that house is back where it began.
Work is crucial to our own personal wellbeing. It defines the way you see yourself, often disproportionately so. Take it away and you open the door to an identity crisis, never mind all the obvious practical financial implications. And it seems even being exposed to the vague possibility that your secure standing is about as secure as a tent pitched in the dark causes a response that has, at its base, self-defence and self-preservation.
As such, we enter the new year with the dukes up. Nobody’s actually threatened us, but we’re going to come out swinging if someone so much as glances sideways in our direction.
I wonder if the kids notice any change – because there has been no real change. They go about their business, rain or shine, their only concern being whether they get dessert tonight or not, whether they can convince me to let them stay up a half hour extra tonight or not.
But they are sponges and we are their grubby bathwater; whatever prevails for us, they soak up. If the wheels come off, they won’t mind as long as we can cope. If the wheels stay on but we’re still fretting, they pick that up too.
We start 2010 much as we started 2009. The jaw may be a little tighter set and the stance somewhat provocative, but we go on much as before. The sense of disquiet and undercurrent of anger that seems to be gaining momentum throughout the country has affected us, even when there is no tangible reason for it. With each new political scandal, with further revelations of clerical abuse, with job losses and punitive taxes, the country – and the people who make it up – feels like it is toughening, becoming hardened.
The family alters in much the same way. I hope we don’t become too wary, or too harsh.
- abrophy@irishtimes.com