Is  family the training ground where fully paid up members test out and develop  emotional boundaries?  Is it a vast assault course where each contestant   takes up the challenge of how to live with emotion?   Some better than others…One paints the  obstacles dayglo,  another attaches ribbons to the various apparatus and another  takes out a chainsaw to  hack through it.  

The assault course with an infinite number of variations and transmutations is  tailored specifically to each individual.  Do you  sit in the centre and refuse to climb over or under any obstacle?  Do you draw the others to you?  Do you subvert instruction left behind by past generations?  Do you offer  instructions to anyone listening?   Do you pretend there is no assault course and get stuck beneath camouflage netting? Have you found your place? There.  All’s well then.

Do you become something?  Are these the skill sets then  employed  in the wider world that rages outside?       It takes half a lifetime to realise the latter and the other half to deny it.  Will you have children and offer advice as to how to get through it   stay under the camouflage netting.  Or will you become tearful as you see them struggle as you knew  they would  in your heart of hearts.  

There will be a child in one generation who sees through all the constructs and courses and assaults.   These children who see never regard themselves special:  They wake early some mornings sit in the garden and watch dew become invisible. They sit there to see if shadows, left  from night,  slide into earth by day.  They are the dawn net of light as it flings itself across us.  They whisper so quietly with such surety you must close your eyes and ears to hear them.

But times happen they cannot move on waking. Fearful eyes dart from side to side as  tears weigh them down to the bed in a spiders web of glass beads  Deceptively  each family nominates an assassin.  Somebody  who must find the child   in the glass bead  condition. They must walk into the  bedroom  slip  out the knife,   hang  it’s tip   above the childs heart, and with the hunched shoulders of familial betrayal,   push down.