I've been meaning to start doing this for a while, so here it goes...
We got a new living room suite today. It wasn't a particularly momentous event, a man came, picked up the old one and dropped off the new one. If I'm honest it's only new to this family, I don't know who owned it before but they seem to have taken good care if it.
Anyway, there was of course the ordeal of moving furniture which I'm sure would be straight forward with most families but here it just seemed to be my brother telling me to keep out of the way and that I wasn't helping apparently. I could feel the tension building, especially when the delivery man had gone and we discovered that the new suite was slightly bigger than the old one and isn't very comfortable. It seems to be a sort of menacing presence in the room. A dark, green, leathery presence. Mum definitely doesn't like it and it seems that she's quite unhappy about the whole situation as well. Asking why Dad didn't measure it properly and how the whole room should be cleared out and we should just start again. I sometimes find it difficult to know what to do in these situations, i.e. when mum seems to be a bit depressed.
I like to think I try to look on the bright side and find something good to say but today I failed. Possibly because mum's bad mood is catching but probably because the suite is big and uncomfortable and I can see it causing hassle in the near future which I am definitely not looking forward to.
As usual the family has dispersed to separate rooms and life goes on. I don't know what anyone else is doing and I don't really want to know. We don't talk much in this family to be honest but it seems to work for us. We save our words for when they'll mean more and we'll want to hear them. I also think that we're avoiding confrontation (I know that's the reason I'm not in the living room right now).
The unusual thing that has come out of this whole episode was the thought that popped into my head quite unexpectedly in the middle of it all. "I can't have kids", not as in I'm uncapable but as in I shouldn't. I think it's because I looked at the way our family functions under stress and how I fit into that and I realised that I don't want to pass that situation on to future generations. I expect that all families have bad points, it would only be natural; but my urge is to avoid those points and so logically I feel that I shouldn't have children.
I don't know if I'll hold to this view forever as I am still fairly young and many things could change but I will admit that it's not the first time I've had the thought that I'm not suited to dealing with family life. I'm not particularly saddened by this thought, if anything I'm glad to be finding out more of who I am.
That's about it for my first thought really and it seems to be a bit vague and rambling but I'm not going to apologise because I'm not telling anyone that I'm writing a blog, therefore if you're reading this you brought it upon yourself. Although I expect I will have many more thoughts I doubt that they will be turned into regular posts but we'll see if this is going to be something I will stick at or whether it will be a brief fad.
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