One of the advantages of having a bedside radio is that if you wake up early you can reach across and switch on a program and escape into a world of broadcast information which, because you are just escaping sleep makes the mind more receptive to the issues being broadcast.
'Crossing Barriers' is a program which as the name suggests is about the social, ideological and cultural barriers which are becoming more and more prevalent in today's multicultural environment. This mornings show discussed the barriers that food presented within the family. It depicted an Indian man, used to his mother's cooking, for him the importance of food in his life was a product of a varied and rich diet at home. Another portrayed the conflict of an authoritarian woman who had become vegan and pressured her meat loving husband to do the same. A third described the coupling of a woman from Hawaii who had grown up in a large family used to eating large meals and her partner a Dutchman who had grown under Protestant tutelage, of eating a balanced meal but eating just sufficient and no more.
Except for the vegan couple, there were massive amounts of compromise as the couples tried to negotiate their love for each other in a search for a secure footing where past assumptions were negotiated without hard and fast rules.
For the vegan, the woman was unbending. The man had made the concession to her because of his feelings towards her and it seemed much more of a power thing and he seemed happy in conceding she had won.
It's yet another example of the fraught nature of marital coupling. The difficulty of combining our past with the future, of being free to either continue to celebrate what had made you the person you were with a new person, acceptable now to the constraint or otherwise of marriage. The term constraint jars in the sense that marriage is a partnership with another person and is supposed to be based on give and take rather than merely for the good of who ever turns out the stronger. Too much compromises might distort the values of one or both to the point that each feel they are walking on eggshells just to avoid confrontation.
These broadcasts stimulate the thought that in households across the globe, from the patriarchal Asian family where the man is head of the family to the latter day American family where women have established a great deal of hegemony over the men.
A potential tempest lurks in the home regarding customs, traditions, likes and dislikes, religious and communal and can be legion. One has to wonder, with hindsight why we put ourselves through the mincer as old sureties are discarded and new habits learnt.
Our search for love, that bond with someone, (usually of the opposite sex) which is supposed to shield us from the ill winds of life, is maybe nothing more than a zephyr an insubstantial breeze, maybe we simple draw the proverbial ill wind in closer to buffer us about to the point that we can't imagine any other existence.
Back in the old days the route to a happy family and children was accompanied by a sense of accomplishment, replicating your parents, perhaps fulfilling a desire to provide some sort of meaning to your life through the accomplishments of your children. What is missing is the child's own battle with the same torments that tormented you, the same unanswered questions the same need to do it their way.
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