Tatevik’s Reviews > Family Album > Status Update

Back when the children were still there Alison somehow never envisaged a time when they would not be. Oh, she knew it would come—but she never considered the implications, tried out the idea of an emptied house, listened for silence. They went gradually, of course, so silence came gradually, and there were returns […]. She has got used to it. You can get used to much-she has known that for a long while.

The garden swings grow moss; the sandbox is buried in dead leaves. It is all right, it is fine, everything is as it ever was, except different. Alison has faced down the passage of time, and emerged, if not triumphant, then afloat, on course.

But you love them all, and if there are six you don't spread it more thinly, somehow there's just more of it. When they're small they love you back, but of course later even if they still do it doesn't much show, and you just have to reckon with that, you can't expect demonstrations…

They want to know how to stop their babies crying at night and what to do about two-year-olds' tantrums, and sit impassive while she tells them that the important thing, the really crucial thing, is a real family life with lots of love and attention for everyone, all the time, and plenty of family rituals, birthday parties and everyone belonging, and of course lovely home-cooked meals.

Neither frazzled nor laid out. Triumphant, on the whole. Fulfilled. Numbers matter—we were her bank statement. Quantity counts. We were the largest family on the street, in the school—in the town I daresay. She was unchallenged. And of course the little local glitch was a family matter.

But the house was just the backdrop. What went on in it was her creation, in every sense. Motherhood was her profession, and I have no idea if she fell into it or planned it from the moment she was a five-year-old with her first doll. Suffice it that that was what she did. My mother-our mother —set out to be the archetypal mother, the universal lap.

Perhaps need is the crucial element in any relationship, the necessary bonding material. Sexual need, emotional need, material need. But both parties must be needy, in one way or another, or things will run amok.

Until, in the nature of things, fission takes place—but at Allersmead that was a long way off, unthinkable even, for what now seems to Gina an eternal present. There was Allersmead, and its inhabitants, except that now and again there might come a moment of observation, of evaluation.

A family is a coherent mass, a set of people united because that is the way it is, progressing thus from day to day, year by year, and who is to question the matter? The component parts of this mass may make their individual sorties into the outer world —they may go to school, go to work, go shopping —but they always roll back into that self-contained unit.

Never my favorite child. Well, one hadn't thought that one was, and
does it matter?
Somewhere, in some deep tender unsuspected crevice, it does. [Gina]