Miki Dedijer

Coaching for Relational Parents | Miki Dedijer

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The strain on consumer families

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The strains of sustaining the central family fire in a consumer family are more often signs of these trying times than our inadequacies or inexperience as parents.

Until a century ago, and in many places far more recently, the family depended for its health on continuous exchanges with extended family, neighbors and a local community.

In consumer society today, the family purchases most of its sustenance to the best of its ability from professionals, specialists and experts at schools, institutions, corporations, agencies.

We entrust our children to others while we’re at work. We rely on doctors and chemistry for our health. We rely on supermarkets to supply our food. We rely on social workers, retirement homes or care units to tend to our vulnerable ones. We rely on mortuaries and undertakers for our dead.

Consumer society–where our basic social needs are up for sale and local community thus made obsolete–consumes the family by replacing most of its social functions, making it more prone to dysfunction.

Here, family easily becomes fraught with isolation, loneliness, disconnection and the consequent stress of one or two adults doing their utmost to hold it all together. Trying to sustain family vibrancy, loving relationship and a nurturing environment for our children in this setting is a sisysephean task.

Autonomy is a managed existence dependent on purchased services flying a false flag, leaving us oddly and suprisingly in an interminable search for home. We depend on an impersonal system to provide us what we once provided for ourselves, with the help of community.

Family is not a sentiment. It’s a function. It is shaped, formed and sustained by the ways in which we come together, how we share chores and work, and the web of mutual dependence and vital relationships that bind us to one another.

Personal wholeness and well-being depends entirely on communal wholeness.

And so health for our children asks that we as parents devote ourselves to tending a family home of co-dependent people who are also dependent on the place in which we live, on our neighbors for our social life, and disciplining ourselves to the craft of knowing our place well enough to meet our basic needs.


Becoming a family servant

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In a few days, a dozen or so men are gathering at our farm around a man about to become a father.

So I’ve spent some time pondering what this moment asks of us, now that his life seems to be taking him away from a certain singularity awash in endless possibilities, towards an obligation to be tethered to the bundle of ties that is family.

Now there’s a word, family, pregnant with hidden meaning, fully birthed only by a willingness to wonder some about its ancestry.

Family, from the latin famulus, is originally an adjective meaning servile, or a noun signifying a servant or slave. We may receive this as a negative, this posture of submission, but I suspect that there’s more to it then what the knee’s jerk suggests. As the verb famulur, it indicates someone who ministers, tends to or waits upon someone or something.

And so there is an action concealed within the pale lifelessness of the noun, something being done that is of consequence to the one being acted upon.

The servant here is not a single person submitting to the will and command of others of higher standing. Nor does it ask of us that we resign ourselves to tending to the whole without recompense, agreeing to become gradually impoverished by our  ministrations, forever bound to an insatiable hunger.

When we first tread across the threshold of parenthood, we’re not entering the vaguely heroic realm of sacrifice, rising every day to lay our gifts down at the altar of the child. Not as I understand it. It’s more relational than that, less ridden with resignation.

It seems that as you become a parent, you take on a relational obligation and mutual agreement to serve whatever and whoever needs sustenance. Not sacrifice. Surrender.

For this man coming to our farm, his heart expectant, this may be his pregnant partner. It most certainly will be their newborn child. At times a grandmother or uncle and others of the fold. The family requires the attention of all members onto all members. It ceases to be without this collective willingness to serve.

And in entering this web of relations with the stance of a servant, we soon discover that it extends far beyond our child, our partner, ourselves. For what sustains us, is serving us, is family.

So I wonder if family is only born from our willingness to bow our backs and kneel together in servitude to all that calls on us for nurturance. As a man then, we marry into family by a pledging our allegiance to matrimony, the condition of the mother. This is the honor bestowed on the one entering wedlock, to become a servant, not master, in the household of life, human or otherwise.

Our children are not exempt from this daily practice of family-making.  They too are asked to learn this willingness generously to serve, so that they may one day come of age, knowing that beyond the immediate family, there’s a larger community fed by their willingness to give what they are able to part with, and some of what they relucantly know they must give up for life to continue.

Spring cleaning

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When the sun comes out again in Spring, we notice how much there is that needs a good cleaning, stuff we’ve tucked away during the dark months of winter.

Psychological garbage we’ve forgotten to take out. Guck that clutters our senses. Lead weights that sink our hearts. Unmet expectations and stale resentments with a sharp taste of bitterness.

The rituals of spring are about endings, renewal, rebirth. This is a time of bonfires that consume deadwood, transform darkness into light, and mark the end of winter.

One possible meaning of the Gaellic Imbolc festival is the Old Irish imb-fholc, “to wash/cleanse oneself”.

You may have a spring cleaning of your home and family relations. Rather than analyze it and try to make sense of it, gather all that has served its time into a bundle of dust, light it up and watch it go.

Your secret lover

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Your partner doesn’t know your secret lover called Plan B.

Plan B is softer, more loving, doesn’t smell of onions. It has nicer parents, better health, and always agrees with the values you want to share with your child. Plan B doesn’t age.

It is the other life you dream of when this one seems unbearably mundane, ordinary or average.

You call on Plan B by whispering to yourself  ‘if only…’, or ‘I want more…’ or ‘that’s it…’

Whenever you’re cradling Plan B, you’re not present to your relationship. You have one foot in, and one foot out the door running towards a mirage. A part of you is absent.

Are you ready to share your secret, and tell your partner about Plan B?

How sometimes you imagine living on your own again. How you worry sitting by the bedside of your sleeping child, that you might not be up to the task of parenting. Or that you long to rekindle a tenderness that used to be there but now seems atrophied somehow.

For as long as it lasts, true comittment doesn’t house a secret lover.

Playlist of your ancestors

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Music is a bridge to our ancestors

You can wander on the arch of a tune towards the loved one’s you’ve lost.

For me it’s Marian Anderson’s “Coming through the rye,” a song my father would theatrically sing to us as children. Or my grandfather’s songs that he learned in Sweden’s endless spruce forests, during months of tending earth kilns for coal.

Our family has some twenty or more of these songs in our family jukebox.

You will have your own playlist of the ancestors, of course.

Carry it with you like a medicine bundle of songs to help your heart remember the full reach of your family tree, swaying to the rhythm of time passing.

Attachment beyond mom and dad

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Attachment theory places a child’s sense of belonging at the breast of the mother, or in the lap of the father.

But we’re all born with a need for attachment to a home that is far vaster than the nuclear family.

Imagine instead an attachment theory that knows the pain of being uprooted and adrift, and so honors the child’s need to be intimate with the place to which she’s born. This acknowledges the need of every child to plant her little being in a wild home of familiar forests, streams and constellations.

Envision a theory that bows deeply to the ancestors who breathed your child into life, and can speak at length about the devastating poverty of holding but a few drops of one’s rich bloodline.

See the theory stretch to also wrap around your child’ need for attachment to community, a diverse social ecology in which to develop all of her gifts.  Here the theory acknowledges the ills of isolation and fragmentation, and grows its reach outwards, to the embrace of an extended family and a thriving village.

As it is, you and I may rate ourselves as securely attached in theory, yet feel curiously homeless. Well if you do, it’s of little surprise. To truly come home, our children–and ourselves–must attach to all of life.