I bought a card, carefully crafted what I wanted to write, what I wanted to say. It was the first Mothers’ Day since I’d had a baby, and I was exhausted, deep in the newborn trenches, and newly appreciative of all my own mum had done for me. I wanted to let her know that now, after 30-odd years, I could see what I hadn’t before.
We spoke later that day. ‘It’s funny’, she said. ‘The message on your card was almost identical to your sister’s.’
Laura had recently had her first kid too. We’re twins, with a sister two years older, so respect for our parents was high. The stories of our baby days had suddenly become heroic; for example, middle-of-the-night feeds involved carrying us one at a time to the couch, feeding us at the same time, burping and changing us, then putting us back to bed – ‘all without waking your father’. We both realised the sacrifice involved, the focus on the needs of tiny little humans above all else.
Author and philosopher Alain de Botton nails this well in his book The School of Life: An Emotional Education.
‘If as adults we have even a measure of mental health, it is almost certainly because, when we were helpless infants, there was a person (to whom we essentially owe our lives) who pushed their needs to one side for a time in order to focus wholly on ours. They interpreted what we could not quite say, they guessed what might be ailing us, they settled and consoled us. They kept the chaos and noise at bay and cut the world up into manageable pieces for us.’
But mental health is not the only legacy of how we’re raised. Everything from our ability to form secure attachments, our view of the world (is it scary or lovely?), attitude to work, money and relationships are predominantly shaped within our family, usually without us even realising. (These are of course affected by all sorts of broader cultural things such as power dynamics, where our society is on the individual vs collective scale, work ethic, and way more.)
This emotional inheritance is such background to our lives that it’s really hard to see, usually only popping clearly into view in contrast or conflict. As a kid, part of what I loved about going on holidays with other families was the window it gave into their lives, their norms. They were always so different to mine, and yet these others always acted as if it was just the way all families were. As a teenager I was intrigued by the party atmosphere at a friend’s beach house, full of half-cut parents; it was very different from the board games, books and boogie boards of my summers.
Parenting styles is another one where you can see your upbringing in high relief. My inability to sit down and relax until every single one of the jobs is done is very different from my husband Guy, who has an internal switch that is ready to be thrown from ‘work’ to ‘fun’ on a whim, a time or the clink of a bottle. But then I grew up in Canberra as a child of a teacher and a public servant, both of whose parents ran small businesses in Queensland – it’s not surprising my parents were all about safe, secure jobs, working hard and saving money. In my early 20s I had a conversation with a friend who was starting his own business. I still remember being amazed and confounded that anyone would not choose a salaried job (with its regular pay, holidays and lack of responsibilities) over the risks of starting your own thing.
On the other hand, Guy went to boarding school from the age of eight, and his Dad’s jobs ranged from Navy to commercial pilot to small-time property developer. Understanding and compromise are needed in our house for conversations around pocket money and how many treats are too many.
It’s not just about parenting either, and nor does is it contained within one generation. I’ve always considered my dad to be stereotypically German in his organisation, the way he always does things properly, and thinks very carefully before acting: our garage had marks on the wall outlining his tools, each task was carefully considered before execution, and done to the required standard. These traits live on in on my older sister – pretty amazing considering that my great-grandfather was the last to live in mainland Europe.
I’ve just finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and can’t believe a) how relevant it is to this topic, and b) that it’s been sitting on my shelf for years and I haven’t read it until now. For those who haven’t read it (and you should!), it’s about understanding success as a combination of potential, opportunity and background, rather than the standard view of success being due to an individual’s talent and work ethic. Gladwell argues that it’s not really about what a person is like, rather it’s about where they are from – from family background to geographical area, cultural background and the broad timing of their birth.
There are loads of fascinating examples. How a series of random connections meant the Beatles went to live and play in Hamburg and played eight hour sets, six days a week, for months on end, becoming polished performers and hit-writing machines. It details how the Asian countries where kids excel at maths were historically rice-farming cultures (a time-intensive form of agriculture where crop yields are largely down to personal effort), with the resulting work ethic leading to more intensive schooling (average of 240 days a year in Japan versus 180 in America), which allocate much more time to maths. There’s much more to it than these brief snippets, but my takeaway is that where you end up depends a lot on where you are from.
This is true on the small scale and the large: from a family’s attitude to risk, to a culture’s attitude to power, status and the status quo. On the individual level, so many of our underlying stories, settings and beliefs are laid down before we’re aware of them. From birth to when we leave home, we’re busily absorbing everything - our sense of safety and security in the world (generally starting with parental attachment), our attitude to work, leisure, self-care and money, to managing relationships and even political persuasions.
And because so much of this is default, operating in the background, it takes us decades (and sometimes forever) to recognise what we have absorbed, before we can start to see its impact on our lives and understand that our foundations are not true and universal. Instead, they are very subjective, based on our particular lives and experiences.
I know I’m going hard on the parenting examples, but this week I listened to the Imperfects podcast where the amazing Lael Stone (speaker, educator, author) talked about her slow transformation into a grumpy, resentful mum. With her first child, her internal story was that she had to do everything, without complaint or considering her own needs – she only got a break if someone else (probably her husband) saw how good she’d been and how tired she was and gave her permission to down tools. She didn’t recognise this as her story at the time (nor how ridiculous it was), so plugged away resentfully, waiting for her husband to tell her to take some time for herself.
Eventually she recognised this background, shared it with her husband and deliberately broke the pattern. Once she was more able to recognise and meet her own needs, she became a much nicer person to both be, and be around.
If we don’t recognise something as a pattern, we’ll just repeat it, or react against it, and we may or may not be aware that there’s more going on underneath. But the first step to change is understanding. Alain de Botton nails it, (as usual):
‘Each of us is the recipient of a large and complex emotional inheritance that is decisive in determining who we are and how we will behave. Furthermore, and at huge cost, we mostly lack any real sense of what this powerful inheritance might be doing to our judgement. The presence of the unknown past colours, and sharply distorts, all our responses to the present. We interpret what is happening in the here and now… through expectations fostered in long years whose real nature we have forgotten.’
He goes on to talk about how even when we do recognise the particularities of our circumstances, we can use them as an excuse, as a way to explain and accept something that we can’t change – it’s not our fault, it’s our temperament – rather than giving us insight and understanding into ourselves and the path to change.
He writes: ‘Yet because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we too easily take our temperament as our destiny…It may not be easy, but it is not alterable or up for enquiry. The truth is likely be more hopeful – though, in the short term, a great deal more uncomfortable. We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago.’
So what’s the solution? Being more aware of how our histories have shaped our lives and attitudes. Trying to recognise and understand the resulting patterns and stories so that we can see where they are holding us back. Recognising (and trying to change our reaction to) triggers, and generally being kinder and more compassionate to ourselves and others.
Understanding the huge influence of the past on the future can also lead to more concrete, actionable, effective actions. In Outliers, Gladwell talks about how Korean Airways’ appalling safety record in the late 80s and 90s was transformed by recognising the airline’s cultural inheritance. Korean culture historically pays high attention to people’s relative status, meaning that subordinates (in this case, first officers and other crew) were not speaking up or being listened to, allowing errors to compound into crashes. The airline mandated that all flight deck communication was in English, reducing the cultural hierarchy and legacy, and the airline’s safety record dramatically improved. (There’s more to it – read the book!)
In a more personal example, recognising the messages I’d absorbed around the desirability of safe, secure work (both from my family, and Canberra’s wider culture of public servants) gives me insight into my own fear of professional risk-taking. Instead of thinking that I’m not cut out for running my own show, I can understand why instability makes me uncomfortable, and can put things into better perspective.
Something common among people raised to work hard is not knowing how to stop, and losing sight of what else there is to do other than work. (And my definition of work here is very broad – care, volunteering, paid work, house work – anything that is not done for themselves, but the good of others.) What was modelled was working hard, not being ‘selfish’, always being busy. They’ve spent so many years not making time and space for things they want to do that they find it hard to even work out what this might be. The first time I heard this voiced was by a friend when we were both in our mid-20s. After years of study and work, she said: ‘I don’t even know what I like doing any more!’ And - no surprises - this has only got worse with age and kids and mortgage and responsibilities.
In this scenario, the idea of creating time and space is uncomfortable, bringing feelings of guilt and laziness and other heavy baggage. But the alternative is to keep working hard, relaxing only on holidays, and finding things to continue working hard on, even in retirement. (Even if that’s only bridge and worrying.) And in the meantime, modelling this for the next generation.
When put like that, I don’t think there’s really an alternative other than investigating the past to unlock the future, and following the nuggets of curiosity and joy. And De Botton agrees, at least in this quote.
‘We each face calls, triggered by chance encounters with people, objects or ideas, to change our lives. Something within us knows far better than our day-to-day consciousness permits us to realise the direction we need to go in in order to become whom we could really be.’
I'm hoping for a comment or two on this one, and least from my lovely sisters expressing their delight at me sharing that photo...
So many gorgeous ones, Laz, but that’ll have to do…