"And so all is right in this best possible of worlds…."

Once upon a time there was a girl called Jenny and a boy called Joe. They had known each other since they were 7 years old. They had always been very good friends and then they realised that they were head over heals in love and they got married, had beautiful twins and settled down in a nice cosy…

All right ok -Cut the crap.

 As lovely as it sounds this isn’t the way the story goes most of the time. Maybe in an ideal world?  I’m not denying this ever happens but most of the time it doesn’t. People often marry for the wrong reasons or make mistakes and marriages break down.

In an ideal world, the Nuclear family is the ideal family-the cereal packet family. Mummy is happy. Daddy is happy. The children are happy. Even the family dog is happy. All smiling in the family portrait when in reality things may be much different.

This is not the ideal world. This is reality.

There are many different views and beliefs with rehards to the purpose and structure of family.

In one corner we have the ‘Functionalists’ who will argue that the family is positive for society. It provides a means of ‘ primary socialisation’ and  fiancial suppost for it’s members as well as providing  a comforting envoirnment for members to support eachother in. Parsons named this the ‘warm bath theory’ .

In the far right corner  we have The New Right- a phiolosophy with elements of Thatcherism and neo-liberalism-  who  only regard the Nuclear family as positive. They are not in favour of family diversity. According to John Redwood, Conservative MP: ‘the natural state should be the two-adult family caring for their children’. The New Right sees the family in a state of deterioration.They feel that single parent families and same sex couples are bad for society and that children  from Nuclear families do better at school and are less likey to turn to crime.

This arguement however could be counteracted by the Marxists, who attack this arguement from the far left claiming that the family is merely a merely a middle class instrument that promotes class divison. They say  that makes our society infair as they can afford to pay for Private education etc.  They also argue that the middle class family expliots women.

        “Abolition, of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this imfamous proposal of the          communists.

On what foundation is  the present family, the bourgeois family ,based ?On Capital on Private gain…….

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private. “

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO,KARL MARX AND FREDREICH ENGELS

Feminists will agree as they feel  the nuclear family  moulds  members into gender stereotypes-keeping the women at home while the men go out to work. They’ll put forward the case that the nuclear family traps women in unhappy marriages as well as leaving them vulnerable to abuse and domestic violence as Dobash resaerched. This often reffered to as ‘The Dark side of the family’

So with all these arguements fresh in our minds, what are we suppose to believe?

In theory the Nuclear family comes out tops with me. On some conditions I agree with the New Right and on others I agree with Marxists….

I understand that we live live in an incraesingly secular and messed up world so the Nuclear family doesn’t always work out. I fuly accept this, howver it’s plausible for the Nuclear Family to work out if peopel were to marry for the right reasons.

The right reasons…

Why do people get married? I could give you a multitude of reasons.I find it much easier to say that marriage seems to make the most sense to me when it is done in Christian context.

In a Christian marriage, the bride and bride groom are joined together in ‘holy matrimony’. Vows are exchanged and the two people are making there vows  before God which means they should not be broken.

When two people decide to get married it should mean that they want to spend the rest of their lives togteher.

Wedding vows can take a format similar to this but some people choose to write their own.

“I, _____________, take you, ______________, to be my wife/husband, according to God’s holy decree: to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do we part: and to that I pledge you my faithfulness. “

However, This brings me to my next point. It pains me to admit it, I have always been sympathetic towards the political left . I am am often torn been revolution and tradition.

 Because the vows are made before God and shouldn’t be broken, what about divorce?

Personally, I feel that divorce should be available. I understand that ideally divorce shouldn’t happen but sometimes it would be better for the couple to part and go their seperate ways. If one partner was suffering from domestic violence what other ‘healthy’ way is there out of a marriage?Or if they were constantly fight and had children?

 It is  now much easier to obtain a divorce and I feel that this has somewhat cheapened marriage. I believe we have an understanding God who loves people not rigid rules. He is also a God of wrath.

I find this is a real moral dilemma. On the one hand I don’t think it is right to bend the rules to suit yourself. Where do you draw the line?  It would become a dangerous slippery slope……

It is much easier to take the absolutist viewpoint and say that, Divorce is wrong and there is no way around it.  

But what about the people involved. I really do not feel that it is right for me to say Divorce is always wrong. People find themselves in some awful circumstances.

Again, I feel that is necessary to look for the truth inside yourself. Nobody is  any position to judge you apart from God. I feel that inside every person there is an absolute truth… somewhere deep inside them…and when they find this absolute truth it will in turn set them free. 

I often read to my little brother Lewis. He is four years old and adores books. A few months ago, in a book-  club magazine he was given at nursery school, there was a series a books available to buy. At the top , “Happy Families”, was printed. Some of the stories are straightforward enough but there are two in particular that stuck out as ‘odd’ or ‘left-wing’ as I would call it.

Mrs. Cliff the climber. Basically the story goes that she meets a man falls in love gets married, has children, divorces him and the same thing happens again. Twice.

Miss Dirt the dustmans’ daughter is also a somewhat peculiar little tale…..

Now this is the dilemma I find myself in…..

I fully comprehend that divorces happen and the nuclear family doesn’t always work out. I have clearly stated that I am sick of the ‘happy ever afters’ but the fashion that these books are written in doesn’t sit easy with me or the rest of my family for that matter.

One part of me says “Yes, Amy, children need to know all about family diversity at the ripe age of 4 and half….’ yet the other says “Oh…this is talking about it as if marriage doesn’t mean anything”….”Do children have it in them to understand anyways?”

I know- you can’t have it both ways…but what is ‘right’?

 I don’t feel that it is ‘right’ for me to force my own views,values and beliefs on others- hence my user name being ‘drawyourownconclusions’. I am not writing this to ram my beliefs down other peoples throats.

Like I said I am often torn between tradition and revolution.

 I don’t quite know how right it is too breed your own values into children. I don’t understand what is right. Are we supposed to tell them about homosexuality and divorce? I don’t know.

Morality….Subjective or Objective….I think I’ll dedicate a whole post to this at a later date….

Do I ever want to get married?

Ideally, it would be nice to but I probably won’t. The idea of marriage scares me actually. The idea of loving someone scares me.  I don’t think I know what love properly is and don’t know how I’ll know if it ever know  decides to lumber down my way. The idea of spending the rest of my life with someone and being in love with them is daunting. I suppose it all comes down to trust. I don’t know if I could ever trust someone enough to marry them. Amy the cynic comes out again….anyway…only time will tell

Maybe you are  thinking that I come from the cosy nuclear family?

I don’t.

I am part of a reconstituted family. My Mum married when she was 19. Had me at 20. Divorced my biological father when I was four or five.

I actually have a lot of respect for my mum. She didn’t have the easiest upbringing by any means  when she was a child and received no support-financial or otherwise from my ‘dad’ . She worked so hard to pay the bills and I never went without anything. She is always there for me when I need her and I really look up to her.

My mum remarried when I finished Primary Seven. My step-dads name is Derek and I get on with him really well. So well in fact I call him ‘Dad’…Mum and ‘Dad have two sons, Lewis who is almost five and Ewan who is  almost two.

Sometimes, if you let it I feel that that being part of a reconstituted family can mess you up. I’ll admit, it can create Identity issues but  only if you let it. I have a different surname to the rest of the family and it used to really bother me. In truth, sometimes it still does with Dads side of the famliy….I feel like I don’t fit in sometimes but Now I have accepted that I am who I am, nothing can change that. I feel that I fit in with mum, dad and my two younger brothers Lewis and Ewan.

Some people say bloods thicker than water. To me, the water is like  vegetable soup. With the stock and vegetables giving more substance and flavour and it’s thicker than blood. A lot thicker.

Blood isn’t always thicker than water.