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A mere 2,000 years after the disciple Luke taught us about the Prodigal Son, social media has finally discovered the concept of "going no contact" with your parents.
Unusually, Oprah got there a little later than everybody else who had already been mass-posting about quitting toxic relatives, when she broadcast a blockbuster YouTube show featuring abandoned parents and rejecting children over this "new" trend — she called it — of cutting parents out of your lives.
A short time afterwards, Brooklyn — the first-born son of interstellar celebrities, Victoria and David Beckham — also got the memo and very publicly sacked his parents. The world has been in a kind of ecstatic, voyeuristic, schadenfreudic freefall ever since.
Back home, just a scant two years ago, high-flying PWC chief and Carlton Football Club president, Luke Sayers, was jetting to the walled Renaissance town of Lucca in Tuscany for the 50th birthday celebrations of his wife, Cate, along with enough of their close personal friends to book out almost the entire town.
The roiling PWC tax leaks scandal was blowing up behind him as he left, and yet Sayers's magical life of expensive, luxurious celebrations appeared untouched.
Fast-forward to today and the couple is now estranged, and engaged in a defamation action involving a lewd picture, with their daughters publicly taking the side of their father against their mother.
Happy families, unhappy families — Tolstoy told you years ago how this goes. But most of that sad and sorry stuff of parents who can't connect with kids, and kids who can't trust their parents goes on in quiet desperation behind walls we never get to see through.
So, when this age-old sorrow explodes in public, it's almost reassuring, a kind of sick-making corrective when the rich and beautiful and blessed and entitled and seemingly perfect are also revealed to have car-crash lives, just like the rest of us.
There is little mystery to family breakdown. The complexity of making those intertwined, sometimes traumatised, sometimes poorly managed connections work is so dense, it is a wonder so many of these units thrive at all.
A lot of us can reproduce. That biological ability is absolutely no predictor of us being able to parent. Home and family have never been safe for many many people. Walking away has a long history, as Brooklyn Beckham's similarly estranged close friends, the Sussexes, have found.
But it is a continuing mystery when the seemingly perfect family chooses to implode so publicly, briefs so many other conduits of their drama, and seeks so many witnesses to their pain. The final taboo — Shakespeare's serpent-toothed, ungrateful child — will always be shocking. The spectacle is an enduringly irresistible one, but after a short period of ogling it, one feels compelled to look away.
So, it's clear that while recent social media may have given it a hashtag, the phenomenon of cutting off parents perceived as unkind or damaging is as old as the concept of family itself. As Oprah found, we have many new terms for an age-old disaffection. You can lose yourself in the social-media miasma of "recognising toxic parents" or "setting boundaries".
Curiously, the therapist on Oprah's podcast who leaned towards the importance of reconciliation wanted to suggest that the more people heard such terms the more they might be led to cutting parents out of their lives (intriguingly, his daughter had done that to him for several years).
But after decades of interviewing people on my radio shows from any and all backgrounds but with complex family histories, it was always mind-blowing to me how children are wired to love and forgive their parents to an extraordinary degree.
I spoke to adult kids of people who faced problems with gambling or drug and alcohol use, absconders, fathers who were barely there, mothers who were barely coping, and despite the sadness and the trauma they were sharing, they almost all concluded with how much they loved their parents. I heard it again and again. "I know that despite all that (insert horror here) she really loved me and I loved her."
The connection and the empathy and the need to make that primary relationship work and thrive is hard-wired into children. It takes so much to break it — so much more than many well-meaning therapists realise, I think.
It's a classic iceberg dilemma: you will only ever see the very top.
In a case like the Beckhams, we will get to see the seemingly minor absolute last straw — an apparently inappropriate mother-son dance at a wedding — but not what one of Oprah's guests called "the one thousand little things" that finally led to the decision to walk. Those histories have very long tails.
There is perhaps one very contemporary lesson in these age-old family sorrows, and that is the dangerous game of commodifying children and so perfectly packaging a family on social media and its possible consequences.
Perhaps when such families, particularly the Beckhams, have built a literal brand (they trademarked their kids' names at birth) out of an image of family perfection, the rot sets in early for children who eventually chafe against it. It's a risky strategy when kids will always grow up, develop their own point of view and start to do the most ordinary but always confounding thing to their parents: they look at us and they judge us.
This weekend there is really only one thing I want to read about and understand — and only Julia Baird can help me: why are all these sharks attacking us?
Have a safe and happy weekend and let's start our year of sounds with a beautiful, yearning tune from London-born Arlo Parks, who wrote this song as an ode to the beautiful oblivion found of the dancefloor, somewhere we'll need to find ourselves a lot more this year. I feel. Nice to see you all again. Go well. |
