Lessons in life that smooth family strife

My family has long since amazed, infuriated and tested me. I have revelled in its strengths and wallowed in its weaknesses.

It has formed me but also confused me. With that in mind, I signed up for the School of Life course on the family.

Everyone has unanswered questions and the School of Life is an institution hoping to offer some answers.

It was founded earlier this year by Sophie Howarth and runs courses on various aspects of life including love, work and politics, exploring them in a playful but thought-provoking way through discussion of history, literature and film as well as psychotherapy and sociology.

The organisation’s course on the family is an intensive weekend workshop examining what makes a family, what its significance is for our emotional development, how it works and how it makes us who we are.

The agenda promised to explore how we were shaped by our childhoods, how we should now handle our parents and how to appreciate why some families are happier than others. Could it help me understand my own?

I and 21 others gathered in the cosy teaching room of the School of Life’s London headquarters to find out.

Apart from one set of siblings and one married couple we were all strangers, so course facilitator Rebecca Abrams, an author and expert on families, encouraged us to introduce ourselves by telling the group who we are within our family.

In my case it’s a combination of mother, daughter, sister, aunt, niece and cousin. Immediately, this made me start to think about my role: where I fit in, who I am and what I represent to those closest to me.

I had never really considered before that I filled any particular place beyond being a daughter and a mother.

Predominantly I feel like a daughter; my role as mother to a five-year-old son seems almost external, something that I am only when in my own home and in the presence of my child.

We discussed our childhood and our relationships with our siblings, something I was keen to examine and analyse. Growing up, I always felt very much like an only child.

With a 12-year age gap between myself and my brother, we never had a shared childhood.

I know this has had a real effect on my relationships with others: outside the security of the family home I was quite

an introverted child and found other children challenging.

At home and indeed around other grown-ups, I was vocal, outgoing, a show-off, something I have seen mirrored in my own son, who basks in the praise and presence of adults yet is not forthcoming in the slightest around children of his own age.

Rebecca asked us to think more about our positions within the family and where we saw our relatives in relation to us.

We drew family maps with ourselves at the centre, putting our parents, siblings and extended family in the place we felt they were in our lives.

This was challenging: despite my immediate family being small,  just me, my son and his father, then my parents and brother, my extended family is huge.

I have more cousins than I can count; second cousins, third cousins, dotted all around the country, some of whom I have never even seen, let alone been able to form a relationship with or glean any sense of “family”.

Throughout the weekend we attempted to make sense of our childhoods: our relationships with our siblings and our parents, toys we cherished and memories of the family home.

We looked at photographs of family groups and tried to work out who or what they represented. As a result, we learned that appearances can be very deceptive.

We talked through statements made about us during our upbringing that had a lasting effect.

One woman’s mother had told her constantly that she was beautiful, something she seemed to have found a burden rather than a positive affirmation.

She had apparently told her mother: “To you I am but not to anyone else.”

Rebecca Abrams placed a lot of emphasis on our “narratives”, our histories, what had gone before us and helped form us.

We thought about our parents’ narratives, which particularly interested me: I knew I was often guilty of not seeing my mum and dad as individuals but simply as a unit. when trying to make sense of my upbringing, I think too much of the effect they have had on me and not the effect I have undoubtedly had on them.

The course helped me take on board that my unexpected arrival, 12 years after their first child, and the life choices

I have made that were so different to their own (to be an unmarried mother, relentlessly pursuing a career) must have challenged them hugely.

We discussed the words and phrases we felt summed us up within the family. I shared “drama queen” and “decision- maker” but kept “pleaser” and “attention-seeker” to myself. Although the strongest attribute I feel my family has always put on me is that of “baby”.

I am the baby of the immediate family, even at 35, and have always been treated accordingly. Being a mother, this can grate an awful lot; I sometimes feel I battle to make myself heard and be treated like a grown-up.

As the weekend drew to a close I began to realise I could deal with that label, enjoy it even.

We ended the weekend by writing a postcard to a family member whom we would have liked to have brought on the course.

I wrote mine to my brother and explained how I felt we needed to see our parents as two individual people rather than just a single entity.

There was not enough space on the card to really explain to him just how much I had taken from the School of Life, how I felt I had reconciled myself with my family’s strengths as well as its weaknesses, and I struggled especially with how to end my message. I seldom write to my brother but in the end I signed off the only way

I really could: with love.

www.theschooloflife.com