Ideally a child should be brought up in a home full of laughter; with a garden which has a wooden swing hanging from an orange tree; a clever mother and father who cheerily share the child-rearing tasks and who are madly in love with each other; a big faithful Labrador and two cheeky siblings. There’d be a Land Rover just by the door to bus everyone around and it would be full of scooters and bicycles and footballs.
If you are reading this and saying to yourself: “Ara, she’s talking about us”, please make sure that you treasure what you have and as Frank Sinatra said: don’t go and spoil it all by doing something stupid.
If, however, your home is not idyllic, join the club. You can plan all you like but life sometimes makes you go through very quirky pathways and you find yourself quite far off from your Plan A.
I should know, because I make up a fraction of those “broken families” statistics. My marriage was shortlived and I am a single parent. Consequently I am an expert on non-conventional families. I say I am an expert because there hasn’t been an academic study I haven’t scrutinised. And I know that us broken families are bad news for society: children stemming from non-conventional families, one expert after the other writes, are bound to be social trouble. Initially, every time I saw a mother and a father strolling down the street with their children, my heart broke into tiny pieces.
Have you watched Ennio Morricone’s The Mission? You know how the Spanish mercenary, played by Robert De Niro, drags an enormous heavy bundle on his back for months on end? For a long while, that’s what I felt on my back: the heaviness of not offering my daughter the best scenario in life. That made me grieve inconsolably and my mind was full of that beautifully sad piece of music: Gabriel’s Oboe.
But then, time passed and one day, while we were at our swing-less, Land Rover-less home laughing our hearts out over something silly, I realised one thing: as long as children are brought up in an ambience of love, it doesn’t matter what shape their family is.
In truth, the answer to my worries had never been far away. I only had to look at two of my dearest friends: they were single-handedly brought up by their mothers. One lost her father at school age, the other, her father left her mother and the country when she was three.
You can plan all you like but life sometimes makes you go through very quirky pathways and you find yourself quite far off from your Plan A
Today they both have been happily married for 15 years and they are two of my most favourite people in the world: strong, streetwise, practical and jolly good fun. Neither had a father figure in their lives but they had several male role models in their uncles and grandfathers who adjusted the missing balance.
“Of course, it was not the same as having a father around the house; it was different,” one said. “But being different is also okay”.
I read somewhere that a family “is not a word, it is who you are, where you come from and where you will always belong, where you feel loved”. I copied that quote down and I got it out of the drawer today; it seems appropriate with all the talk of civil unions and legalisation of adoption by same-sex parents – which essentially means the legalisation of a form of ‘unconventional’ family.
A good chunk of the population is struggling to come to terms with this, which is not surprising, because such a huge change in the social fibre of society cannot be embraced overnight: we have to wait it out.
Only when our children grow up will society be okay with ‘alternative families’. I’m hopeful: the other day my daughter came back from an outing and told me she had made a new friend, and – without batting an eyelid – that she has two mummies and no daddy.
In all of this I am extremely concerned about one thing: the shoddy adoption process, which desperately needs a major overhaul. This should have been done before the law was approved. The process as it is at the moment is not one that scrupulously recognises the interests of vulnerable children and their right to be placed with parents (whatever their sex) who truly meet their needs.
Parents who have been through the adoptive process will tell you that the structures in place are “pitiful” and “one whole disorganised set-up”.
Clearly, as it is, the interests of children are not a priority. I just hope that now that the law is entrenched and the political mileage out of it has been attained, that the revamp of the adoption process will not fall by the wayside.
Meanwhile what is important is that we gradually start accepting that families in the 21st century come in all shapes and sizes.
Seeing as today it’s Easter, we could take the Nazarene family as an example: an unmarried teenage girl with a sudden unexplained pregnancy was hardly the cultural or religious norm in Nazareth.
It’s worth reflecting that, yes, the ideal family is always best, but God chose to send his son in a very unconventional family.
krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti