Happy Families

At the start of summer our cleaning lady quit after having been with us for some years. This was something of a disaster and I tried to talk her out of leaving. But it seems that after all this time the emotional load of being involved with our family just became too much for her. She said that she lived with our loss everyday and that she really wanted a job that didn't pull on her heart strings. I tried to argue that things are getting better, that we have made good progress in dealing our loss and that we would continue to do so. But at the end of the day she had become emotionally exhausted, quite understandably I suppose. In fact it's a measure of the goodness of her nature that she had stuck with us through the last years. Our gardener quit right in the middle of Kay's treatment the miserable ... person.

On the other hand I feel that things in our house are not necessarily as difficult as she made out. We're not exactly sat around in sack-cloth and ashes here. We're operational, we do stuff, we work, we laugh, we play, we go out, we have visitors, the house is not falling apart (quite). We don't sit around all day in tears or mope about like we have reached the end of the world. We don't talk about losing Kay particularly, nor do we reflect everything in the light of our loss. We get on with the most difficult and emotionally challenging thing that can happen to any parent and, content of this blog to one side, we don't make a huge fuss about it. At least, to my mind.

But the other evening I was round at some friends as they were putting their kids to bed. The extended family was present, grandparents, parents, kids. The atmosphere was lovely, a happy family at bedtime. The kids deflecting and dodging instructions to get upstairs, smiling faces, a relaxed atmosphere seemingly without a care in the world. Everyone playing a role and all roles completely filled. The richest family in the world, if you ask me. 

I was struck to the core by just how different their world is from ours. But equally it's difficult to quite put my finger on the difference. I think its got to do with the carefree and relaxed nature of their interactions, external markers of people who are of themselves relatively relaxed and carefree. (I use the word "relatively" because this family, as with most families, is not without its own concerns). But that's not quite it either. There's something about the atmosphere in our house that just weighs more heavily. For example the laughter in our house is quieter and less frequent and when it happens there's a component missing. Now that Lauren is back at school there's only one child around where there should be three. Bedtime involves just putting Nattie to bed and although this is a fine moment of the day, it still feels incomplete. 

How does one feel a hole in one's life? How do we give form to something that is missing? How do we quantify that which isn't anymore? What happens when a family role is no longer filled? When the day misses a key character?

I guess I came to understand why our cleaning lady left. Even when we do our best, put on our bravest faces, carry on with our lives, play, laugh, live, there's a hole that echoes loudly around our house. A missing character, an unfulfilled role. And no matter what we do, that's the way things are. 

Cast in this light it does seem that this life has become a sentence, something to be endured rather than appreciated. The happy families in this world have absolutely no idea just how fortunate they are and just how much I long for the (lost) days when we were a happy family too.