At eighteen I thought of family like a game of squash. You are the player and the walls are the family. With your racket you play the ball and it returns and you hit again. Game on. Stay on your toes. Relax. The ball may spin back at difficult or easy angles so stretch to play it back. That’s right. The thing about squash is it tests all your muscles, muscles you never knew you had right.
The walls in this game have a way of moving further away or closer. Each of your shots must predict the distance for the return to be effective. It’s a game that leaves no physical or mental part of you untested. It makes you fit and ill at times. You grow muscles to balance the strains and stresses, sometimes strange muscles in strange places. You find yourself exercising those muscles with future partners to their horror or pleasure. You may have to go physio in future if you don’t get that looked at. The game lasts a lifetime and however far away you are from the walls you are still playing.
This is what dawned on me. I had the ball. I had the squash racket. I would hit the ball with the racket and it would fly into the sky onwards onwards and I would experience, by merely keeping my eye on the ball, the slow withering of leg muscles until they and I fall to the floor followed over the ensuing years by my arms and shoulders and chest and head. The act of writing for me is the structure and I the player. Like family photographs, family arguments, births deaths and marriages writing was and still is proof that I’m alive at any given time whether or not it is read by anyone. For me, the game of writing, has all the elements that family has. I know my priorities. It’s all relative. At bottom family is proof that you exist by one group of people over a lifetime. Blogging is proof that something, whatever it is, happened at any given time – in lieu of family it’s what it is. My serve.
Please read part one then part two (this one) then part three and then part four
30 mins from when you posted or 30 minutes from when I’m reading, gaah!! I can’t wait. Oh… wait. I am waiting.
It should be up now
‘I blog therefore I am?’ An alternative to ‘This is my family, here is my/our script/s & memories, wherefore I am’? For me family is that place of acceptance. Interaction with it can shape/define me but not entirely. Can the blogosphere do the same?
No it can’t do that Muna. And it shouldn’t. Family is sacred. Story is sacred. Creativity is sacred. What I am trying to say is that family is held together by story, by a created idea of what it is – often un true often believed. I don’t think that is a bad thing but it remains true to me that the stories unfolding in family are what family is.
Family: strange word, so familiar (or familial?)
I have many families: my birth family (some might say the original, but actually still very new to me, still becoming known to me!); my adoptive family (feels like my original family, although not my biological place of origin); my family in-law (a very real family, although not really in-law, as we’re not legally married) those are three, for me, there are more
How complicated life is and how complex the word family!
Isn’t it. But I guess I am talking about the concept of family which is something equal to us all. I guess I am saying that the concept of family is what it actually is.