Page 3586 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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Once upon a time in Australia the word family was an easy one to understand. It simply meant a group of biologically related people who all lived together - happily or not - in the one house. A couple of kids. A dad. A mum. For better or worse. Forever.
But things changed. Times changed. Families changed ...
So what is a family? Well ... it seems the definition really comes from within. If you see yourself as a family, congratulations. The very best of them, however, are the ones that define themselves only by the love, loyalty and tolerance they generate.
I would probably identify more with that second view than with the first view. I certainly support the concept of a traditional family, a nuclear family. I started one only last year. I recognise that the care and support which people offer to others, in particular to children, is more important than marital status. What is important is that there is that level of support. A good indication of how a traditional family model sometimes can be exclusory or off-putting for others was contained in an article by Susan Kurosawa, who wrote in the Australian Magazine on 16 April this year that she proposed renaming 1994 the Year of the Good Parent. I quote a chunk out of her article:
A good parent is a person who stays up all night making fancy-dress frog costumes from one roll of giddy green crepe paper, two saucepan lids and two bent coat-hangers. A good parent is someone who sits eating pies on a wind-whipped hill risking pneumonia and ptomaine poisoning to cheer on the under-12s footie team (ditto for marching girl mums and dads). A good parent wears the same clothes year in and out to buy his or her kids the sort of wardrobe that won't make them feel like nerds ... This same crazed individual spends more on the kids' pump-up out-of-sight sports shoes than on his or her best footwear. A good parent goes on holidays to places where they have buffets with ice carvings of mermaids and junior volleyball on the beach instead of dreamy destinations with fine food and palm trees a perfect hammock's-hoist apart.
And this good parent does all those things because he or she wants to do the best by his or her children. To qualify as a participant in my Year of the Good Parent, you must have graciously involved yourself in activities similar to those above in the past 12 months. I don't care a fig for your marital status, your gender, whether you are heterosexual or homosexual, if you set out to be a Murphy Brown-style single parent or just ended up as one.
Families take all shapes and sizes and it's ridiculous to say only one configuration can work.
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