Wreck it Ralph!

One of my favourite films of last year ( I laughed! I cried!) I read Wreck it Ralph as a lesson in family dynamics :  an explanation for children of why so many weddings, funerals and celebrations end in fights, that isn’t just alcohol.

The film is set in a video game arcade, in which all the characters from the games have self determining lives outside the confines of their games : the premise of Ralph’s game is that he climbs up a building breaking it, while Fix-it Felix, the player’s avatar, follows after him repairing the damage with a magic hammer, and avoids destruction by birds or falling debris. If ‘you’ win, the people in the block run to the top and throw a party for Felix, and give him a medal, and they throw Ralph off the building, where he goes to live in his dump of broken bricks.

The ‘arc’ of Ralph in the film is that he has to leave his game/family in search of the acceptance /medal that his role in the game excludes him from. In freudian terms, this is the necessary trajectory of the child growing up : the point at which the complexity of your needs outweighs the comforts of home is the point where you leave to find your own rewards, and create a new family structure that meets the emotional needs of the adult you become through that process.

The happy ending for Ralph is achieved  through his development of a parental relationship with a child character from a racing game, and the help he gives her in her own search for acceptance in her peer group, which mirrors his own desire for social acceptance from the somewhat two dimensional inhabitants of the flats his job is to destroy. When Vanelope Von Schweetz ultimately wins the race, and her game ( for which read ‘life’) becomes a constitutional democracy with herself as president, it is a metaphor for successful parenting : he proudly watches her win her races from his own altered reality, which now includes decent housing for all, and the inclusion of refugees from outdated games. At the end of the film, he has successfully managed to pull his family/ game out of their fixed view of him as ‘bad’, through becoming a father, and obviously, therefore adult. His last words : “Turns out I don’t need a medal to make me feel good, ‘cos if that little kid likes me, how bad can I be?” is a touching reminder to parents of how much our own little ones mean to us. I did say I cried!

But that is, of course, Hollywood : and it hardly needs saying that the enduring success of an industry based on our desire for redemption, would hardly be so enduring, were the happy endings as reliable in real life as on-screen. Family life is the best thing we have so far evolved to get children safely through to continuing the species themselves, by which time, we need it to be as unbearable as possible to give us the motivation to get the hell out.

Ralph returns to his game/family, and is able to make changes there so that it meets his needs : they happily accept his changes as part of the joy of  having him in their lives. I am sure families like this exist, but perhaps, to reference Tolstoy’s view of happy families, the spectacle of a group of people lovingly nurturing each other through all of lives changes, without struggle or resistance, is so common and mundane that there is no need for it to appear  in dramatic form.

In real life, brothers Felix and Ralph, would have learnt in childhood to understand themselves and the world through their opposing roles : sometimes it seems like nature just loves the drama of matching a ‘fixit’ shy intellectual child with a ‘wreck it’ boisterous sports nut for a sibling, just for the hell of it. The answer is of course, nurture, not by the parents, but in the child’s evolution of its self, is the counterpoint of the ‘not-self’, which in the best case scenario, of a nurturing family, is helped by siblings, but in the worst case of a stressed, neglectful or abusive family becomes set in such unbreakable stone that conflict is the inevitable result of any attempt at progression by any family member.

If the sports nut grows up, and decides to become a university professor, in a nurturing family, the intellectual sibling should welcome the closeness of new areas of shared interest. Lack of nurturing in childhood is a threat to survival, and as such, activates the amygdala, the part of the brain that deals with emergency responses, and children who are brought up with this, will need to work very hard indeed to allow their cerebral cortex, which deals with reason, to override their emergency responses. Children whose ideas of themselves and their siblings have evolved in brains bathed in stress hormones are unable to develop into adults, and change these ideas without a huge amount of work and commitment from their analytical brain. Any suggested change in those ideas will be experienced as threatening to their sense of themselves, and will be fought straight from the amygdala : “Stop trying to be clever, you’re the pretty one, it’s not fair” was something I saw my own mother throw at her sister, when both were in their fifties.

Mostly, like Wreck it Ralph, people sensibly go off in search of a medal in a different game, and keep exposure to siblings stuck in childhood to a minimum : Weddings, Christmas, Ancestors day, Thanksgiving…..

 

Yaaa-aawn….

I have been feeling a bit guilty recently about how lazy I’ve become, which is odd because I don’t usually bother with  guilt : it’s the ultimate in wasted effort, and I’m either too lazy or have better things to do!!

A Google search  for ‘lazy person’ gives you lots of fat men on sofas thus :

and lots of humorous aphorisms about the ‘benefits’ of laziness : eg

Language shows our culture’s disapproval of laziness :  its opposites are desperately keen : hard-working, industrious, diligent, enthusiastic, motivated, ambitious. I have myself spent a fair bit of time over the last few days telling an eight year old that ‘I can’t be bothered’ is something to be ashamed about, not a proud boast.

I am, however, just reading The One Straw Revolution by Masunobe Fukuoka, which is an explanation of the author’s experience of natural farming  (no digging, no chemicals, no compost, no weeding) : written in 1975, it’s really challenging some of my ideas about farming : number one being that it’s really hard work : get up at dawn to milk and feed and muck out : grinding work under the sun all day, very little reward, drop exhausted into bed. Fukuoka, though, being not just a farmer but a philosopher, took the view that our apparent need to be working constantly is part of our separation from nature, and that farming ought to leave ample free time for poetry, and enjoying life’s simple pleasures.

Capitalism, which was and is the primary separator of humans from nature,  can’t tolerate this kind of laziness : we must all be occupied full time in chasing money, so we can buy stuff to support the economy, and fill the strange empty feeling inside us : it scares us with the threat of scarcity, and tells us that if we have nothing or do nothing we will be nothing.

Our own dear prime minister, all freshly fired up from two weeks of quaffing among the athletic elites in the olympic machine, has decreed that all children must do compulsory competitive team sports, ostensibly to make them more competitive in other areas of life. All the parents I saw interviewed said that for children, the emphasis should be on fun, not winning, but hey, what do they know? I want the emphasis of everything to be on fun, even for adults!

I have been a hard-working, industrious, diligent, enthusiastic, motivated,  ambitious over-achiever ever since I discovered it got attention from adults. But you know what? I don’t think I can be bothered any more ; can I just have a few chickens and somewhere to grow food?

You Should Be ME!

This Will Destroy You

This is what comes out of Google Image for ‘relentlessly competitive’ : a bored Scottish band sitting in front of a badly-wound hose!

I have been thinking about competitiveness this week : I dunno, maybe being bombarded with sporting events starts to have an effect after a while!

 

As a parent, you quite often come across people who make you question, and ultimately shape, your core values. We went swimming yesterday, my child and I, with the most relentlessly competitive family I know, so while me and my son were playing sharks in the shallow end, messing about with floats, chatting,  and having fun, the kid who could swim already was being exhorted to swim widths for 20 quid, while the one who couldn’t was anxiously trying to make a similar bargain, and being told he’d have to learn to swim first, and to stop touching the bottom with his feet.  Now, I’m all for bribing children, if it’s the only way, but something about the crass way this poor child was being made to bargain for some self esteem in the form of cash made me have to go right to the other side of the pool immediately.

Anthropological studies have shown that people in ‘natural’ hunter gatherer societies, will not do more work than they need to, in order to eat. There are other things to do : play, chew hallucinogenic leaves, have sex, snooze, chat, eat : all very fine, you might say, but no one ever built an empire on that basis, eh? Our system of late capitalism works by removing our innate sense of well-being and self-esteem, and replacing it with an anxious feeling that other people have more than us, and are therefore better, and we should work longer hours to get more stuff so we can wave our cash in their faces, and then we will feel good about ourselves, or they will feel bad, which is more or less the same thing.

There is a part of me that knows that fear of failure is a powerful driver of success : many millionaires speak of feeling that nothing was ever good enough for their parents. Would you rather be the mother of a millionaire tortured by self-doubt and low self esteem, or a contented underacheiver?

 

Only people living under capitalism would even recognise this as a legitimate question.

Interestingly, capitalist economics is based on the premise of a constant line of growth, stretching into infinity : ever increasing markets, with ever more of us having as much as we want of everything for ever. In nature, however, there are no lines, only cycles : growth and decay, reaction and reaction, expansion, contraction, breathe in, breathe out…

La La La!

Human communication is a funny thing, isn’t it? Spoken language is supposed to be one of the things that distinguishes ‘us’ (people) from ‘them’ (animals) : but then you see a graph like this :

and you wonder why anybody bothers saying anything, ever. Because the chances are, No-one Is Listening.

Now obviously, the human condition is such that we pass our lives  locked in the inner turmoil of our own consciousness, and will therefore never know what anyone else is really thinking, even if they tell us. But I would still like to know what is actually going on for the 93% of the time when people are basically ‘not listening’. Here are some of my observations :

1. Thinking of what they are going to say next. It’s a sad fact of life that no-one is ever as interesting as you, and yet they seem to expect you to give them at least half of the available conversation time. This is why you should interrupt them as many times as you can : they will eventually realise how fascinating you are, and stop talking.

2. Trying to guess the end of your sentence. People do this to me a lot :  maybe I speak too slowly / get distracted / bore people / repeat myself? Thing is, they never get it right, though : they don’t know the end of the sentence, even though they must be listening to the beginning.  Sometimes I ask them to stop, and sometimes I  let them talk while I plan what to say next.

3. Thinking about having sex with you. This maybe sounds better than it is. For example : I used to work with road engineers, and we had a lot of meetings, talking about their projects. The first 20 minutes could be occupied with choosing which biscuit to have next out of the Peek Frean Family Assortment they favoured (public money, plenty more where that came from!). But after that I used to amuse myself by putting them in reverse order of who I would have sex with, if I really really had to.(shudders involuntarily)

4. Staring at the telly. If you have one or more children, you will know that they never listen to the first word of any sentence, which is why warnings like  ‘Don’t scooter down that hill at top speed’, ‘Don’t eat all those sweets, its nearly dinner time’ and ‘Don’t hit your brother, he’s smaller than you’ are all wasted breath. If they are watching the telly, though, this increases to the first three times you say any sentence. This is why they are indignant when you come into the room, shouting ‘I SAID, WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR BREAKFAST!’, because they missedthe first four times when you asked them nicely. In some cases this is understandable : Almost Naked Animals, a cartoon about animals in underwear running a hotel, is manifestly more involving than anything you have to say, ever.

The terrible fact is, though, that if you have ever met anyone that really truly listened to you with their soul, giving you their full attention, even for a minute, you can understand why we can never get enough  of this wonderful feeling. All of us operate with a huge ‘listening deficit’, which is why, I think, we are constantly trying to get ourselves heard with the talking talking talking.

Did you hear that?

I did think I might end this piece with a sincere plea, much in the manner of Rabbi Julia Neuberger on Thought for the Day, to anyone reading this (why, given the topic, am I imagining anyone but myself…)  to give someone today the wonderful gift of truly listening, without claiming back from them your right to be heard. Don’t, though, because if you do, they will so love the feeling of being totally interesting and valued, that they will constantly seek you out for longer and more frequent dollops of the boring crap inside their head, and probably never even think to ask how you are.

Of Men and Menorrhagia

I went camping with two other single parent friends over the bank holiday : yes it has really taken me two days to recover! I came back determined to make a list of the things you really never want to go camping without :

1. Baby wipes. Your days of wiping babies may be happily behind you, but believe me, you will never be so filthy as when trying to live in a field : the mud, the fires, the lack of proper washing or cooking facilities…actually you could upgrade that to a whole-body size squirter of  hand sanitizer.

2.Alcohol. Vast amount, and no the hand sanitiser will not do. Getting drunk is the only way you will cease to care about the discomfort, the inconvenience, and the sheer unnecessary-ness of camping.

3. Bacon. Is the only thing that will cheer you up the next morning when you are hungover in a field, it’s starting to drizzle, and there are lots of children running around, shouting ‘Mum!’ or ‘Dad!’ in loud high-pitched voices, and some of them are yours.

4.Washing up bowl, liquid, and sponge. I think what does me with this one is the preparation : it feels farcical to spend a day packing up enough stuff to replicate your life in civilisation, in a field. You will need these though.

5. A first aid kit. Having one is the only way of being sure you will not need one :  this is Sod’s Law.

6. A Firefighter. Trained in first aid, and therefore not liable to panic when your child brains himself on the tree swing, and is running around with blood gushing from his head just at the moment that you, having crawled off with your hangover to have a shower, have just put the shampoo on.

7.A Landscaper. Who will have a van, from which all manner of useful items can be produced : some pallets to make a table, and wood offcuts to make benches and little stools;  some goggles, so the children won’t blind themselves  while manufacturing stone age flint items to sell to local museums, a beautiful japanese tree saw (Have I already mentioned the Silky Big Boy?) for creating logs. This is a picture of the boys with their Big Boys, and a selection of timber.

8 A Tent. Don’t worry, you won’t ever have to put it up yourself, even if you want to and think you can. As soon as you look even a little bit confused, or as if you might have got a bit the wrong way round, men will swoop in from nowhere, like a roving tent-erecting swat team, and do it for you. You have two choices : you can rail against them, and snatch the tent poles out of their hands and insist on your right to empower yourself with the knowledge of the tent, or you can just let them get on with it, sit down and admire their muscles, and their eagerness to please.

Oh yes, I forgot about the menorrhagia! It was quite entertaining (as these things often aren’t) to have to keep making the gynaecolo-tea from Alchemilla Mollis to treat my inconveniently heavy menstrual flow (clots the size of bulldozers, I’m telling you!: not your ideal camping scenario!)  Not only did it work, but it also kept my two (male) companions entertained for hours playing ‘Guess the Gynaecological Problem’.