It's fascinating how one action by someone can override all the love their nearest ones feel towards them, turning them away forever. This single act becomes the hub around which all future associations are judged.
As my friend Ryan said, sometimes it leaves one in a moral dilemma wondering who is right, what action is right and whose side are we really on. There's so much blurring. Take the case of the mother of two sons, who loves them both equally and brings them up as best she could, to be upstanding citizens. The lads, however, are given to occasional violent outbursts and throughout their school years receive numerous cautions and are told to shape up.
Mother, meanwhile, continues to work at instilling principles. She is accused sometimes by the boys of 'taking the school's side', 'not being maternal enough'. Her response - correctly, one would assume - is to point out that asking for her to support them when they've done wrong is the same as getting her to collude. It's fascinating also how that as the home struggles to shape one, so does the environment outside. Not always complementarily. And sometimes it's the environment that wins. Perhaps children just develop tedium of the eardrum and tune off listening to the same old, oft-repeated parental code of ethics, however correct it might be.
Somehow, the parent contrives to metamorphose into the persona of a nag. Nag, nag, nag. It reaches a point where the more the parent says, the less is heard. More is less in the home.
Outside, however, out of range of the maternal strings that bind, lies the freedom to express oneself as guided by baser instincts and emotions. Anger, jealousy, hatred - long repressed - lie waiting, ready, crouched in the 'strike' position. Outside is where the world lives that is not home. Outside is where you ordinarily take the social skills you've picked up at home and put them to careful use. Outside is where, if you discard the said skills, you're usually headed up a one-way street with a sign warning, 'Peril at the end of the road'. And so our two young brothers, feeling they've been nagged till the cows came home and the moon turned blue, set out independent of thought and eager for action, which is not long in arriving.
Brawl
It happens at the local 'watering hole' where, tongues and fists suitably liberated by two glassfuls of libation, they engage in a brawl - two against one - and render the opponent just a few degrees this side of human pulp. Then they beat it home, subconsciously still tethered to the sanctuary of mother's moral strings. But mother will have none of it once she knows the boys have stepped over the line she has consistently drawn for them. She it is that turns them in to the police and their action, following a short swift investigation and a quick trial, brings them a sharp jail term.
"They must be responsible for their actions," the mother tells the press, hoping that the boys will understand and sympathise with her own action. All the other members of the family, meanwhile - the aunts, the uncles, the grandmas and grandpas, cousins - all these people who've had a lot less to do with the upbringing of these two violent young men, suddenly decide that they have a decision to make.
It appears that a blanket of shame descended upon all of them when blood didn't stand by its own blood, when maternal support - that keystone in the arch of the family system - was withdrawn. As one, they in turn decide to disown the mother. The diluting of blood. We will have nothing to do with you henceforth!
As my puzzled friend Ryan asked, "On whose side are these uncles and aunts? It sounds like they're saying it's okay to go out and bash up someone till he's unrecognisable. We'll swim with you because we're from the same genetic pool."
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
