MUSINGS The dancing-bear school of parenting

DIFFERENT STROKES On closer inspection, no two families are completely alike.

The dancing-bear school of parenting


Would you don a bear suit to spare your cubs the might of corporate advertising?


The Circling Fin
Fin Keegan

One of the great Russian novels, ‘Anna Karenina’, opens up with the intriguing generalisation “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
It’s a great first line, but for once, Leo Tolstoy, master of dramas domestic to dynastic, is off the mark. In my experience, no two families, whether happy, unhappy or indifferent, are alike. Happy families are just as distinct from each other as unhappy families, and besides, most families, like most people, are generally hovering somewhere between the two states. Especially early on weekday mornings.
Most of this opinion I base on childhood memories of other people’s houses. As grown-ups we see little beyond a living room that was probably tidied for our benefit. We are rarely privy to arguments or door-slams or drunken elders being carried up to bed. But, when we were children, we got to see more. Sometimes a lot more. As a boy I remember seeing fathers in their vests, silent at table, contemplating the space before them; mothers smoking at the back door; brothers raiding the drinks cabinet; sisters … well, to be honest, I don’t know what the sisters were doing.
Think back to those kitchens and parlours and bedrooms you saw as a child: Were any two of them, whether happy or unhappy, the same in how they felt, in the way the people of the house looked at and spoke to each other?
Take any street and you’ll find every sort of life being lived. There is a house where everyone drinks their tea through straws to keep their teeth white. Beside it, the parents pretend they live in a different country. Across the road, they are ruled by pets and around the corner (at the door with the ageing SUV outside) they are ruled by banks – dinner is a bowl of cornflakes, if they’re lucky.
Every house has its own ways of doing things, its own shorthand and rituals and codes. In our home, the kids shout out the word ‘wigwam’ when they want to stop a game. Usually this means that some horse-play has turned into a bruising scrap that one side is losing heavily.
And, in our living room, we always mute the ads. Silencing TV advertising is an effective way of wresting power from corporate hands. Unfortunately, the corporate brain struck back with ‘product placement’, which means actors using items in such a way that we cannot avoid seeing brand logos. Surely, somewhere there is a family that has found a way around this tactic. No doubt there is a father, perhaps next door, who dons a bear suit and dances in front of the screen at just the right moment. His children, quite reasonably, think he is mad. But you don’t have to get inside anyone’s house to learn that much: All kids think their parents more or less lunatic.
Perhaps they are right. As Tolstoy might say: “All parents are mad – but each parent is mad in their own way.”

Fin Keegan is a writer based in Westport. This column is based on his weekly radio essay, heard on WRFM and CRC radio, and online at thecirclingfin.com.