One of the greatest and sometimes most punishing things about returning home to my parents’ house for holidays and weekends is being privy to the flurry of conversations I would usually have missed out on in the absence. The mundane updates from my mum and dad ground me again in local historicity, where I am contained in a discussion about the rhythm and minutiae of a family I should otherwise belong to. It was in one conversation about my dad’s mum, my grandmother, who lives in the country, that a small conflict came into play: Should she stay there as her health issues worsen, should she go into care, or should she move across state lines to live with us?
My dad saw it as a viable alternative to the gracelessness and abandonment of sending her to a nursing home, but that option would also take her out of the communities and town where she made sense. My mum surprisingly objected. She read it as an affront to the nuclear lifestyle she had built from scraps. Success and self-realisation was inscribed on her generation as the ultimate goal, and it’s for that reason that she acts as an interesting template for modern boomer ideals. Upward mobility has been the key, a way to free her from the shame of her essentially mercantile past, to build a family that could pride itself on standing on its own legs. She shed friends and family that lagged behind her, revelled in the individualism of the contemporary ethic. Like many others her age, her self-worth pools into the belief that a two parent plus children arrangement – nothing more or less – would mean she had “won”. There isn’t necessarily a stable logic that keeps her domestic dream going outside of that.
Among the friends I have in what is considered to be a generally “radical” bubble in Sydney’s inner west, discussions fly around about the deterioration and disconnection of the traditional family, about polyamory, about the queer future. Despite those continual conversations, some of my more privileged peers still replicate traditional and often possessive patriarchal values of partnership under the guise of hedonism, where one party is the dominant and one is the submissive. Lee Edelman’s seminal work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is often referred to as an example of this ultimate kind of queer pessimism – where hopelessness is thought of as an alternative to constructivity, a release from the contract of the larger world. But for me, that type of nihilistic view doesn’t serve me outside of a temporary satisfaction of ego and to absolve responsibility. Like @FuckTheory mentions in a Twitter thread, queer nihilism can become “topical” and a form of discussion because “upper middle class, often tenured academics have been teaching young people that politics is a futile form of irony ... a generation of students who think articulating why something can’t be done is more profound than doing something.”
The future I want to imagine, though, is not one that keeps me self-centred, but one that keeps me alive and driven for better conditions. It’s one where wisdom is shared between generations and where grandmothers and cousins and other chosen/adopted family members are omnipresent, where love can happen without borders, and nobody gets left behind – all those idealistic, fanciful things nonetheless rooted in material visions that the nuclear family implicitly disregards.
The thought of coming home to both grandparents and parents is one I embrace – during my youth, when both of my parents were working outrageous hours, our grandparents were like additional guardians, as close to us as any other. Of course, our white settler family might see this as a kind of unconventional conversation, and not everyone has the option to repair family ties, but the communitarian ideal is one that is completely natural for many immigrant and Indigenous families. For us – and for them – having big, intimate ties with extended family was even an economic necessity. Ultimately, this trust and interconnection is one that enriches in a way that can’t always be put into words. We need to rely on each other generally, but especially when the going gets tough, when crisis hits. And even though most of us loathe having to ask for help, consider it a sign of weakness, we are social beings. We have an instinctual desire to care for each other and to be in proximity to each other, to recognise our mutual core through humanity. My youth was positively shaped by the accommodations of those large networks, even as an admittedly antisocial and reserved child.
The concept of the extended family is not an unusual one, and what I’m proposing is not some utopian portrait. For western, typically white families in Australia, individual success is predicated on the power of the nuclear family unit. A family is more formidable, flexible and even more honourable if they live by the codes of mother, father and assorted children. In upper middle-class scenarios, the cousins and grandparents are often more relegated to cursory positions, outside of the house, tangential to the family narrative. What the decay of modern life ultimately teaches us is that the mandatory patterns of relating and connectivity that remain supreme may not always be most optimal for our emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
• Jonno Revanche is a writer and the editor of Vaein Zine
