Conversations with a five-year-old about how we know each other
My five-year-old nibling has a best friend he's in the same class as but has also known all his life and last weekend I had the privilege of watching him try to explain this fact to someone else.
He was completely stumped. It was like watching his life flash before his eyes as he questioned the cornerstones of his very existence. He's wonderfully outgoing so it wasn't shyness. How does he know his friend? How did he know her before school? He knows they didn't go to nursery together. What, then? Accident? Fate?
Of course I knew the answer but I wanted to see what he thought. In the end he was led by my aunt, who was doing the asking, to the (incorrect, weirdly gendered) conclusion that either his mummy knew her mummy or his daddy knew her daddy.
His parents then arrived in the room and I recapped so they could provide the actual story.
It's one of my favourite moments with little kids. Breaking the news to them we're not in fact a random collection of people.
One such conversation I remember taking place on a changing mat. "Grandma is Daddy's mummy," their mother insisted. "No," they replied in disbelief.
"It's true," I say when questioned. "I'm Mummy's sister. She didn't just yell out the bedroom window if anyone passing could hold a baby while she had a shower."
Part of it is their inability to handle stuff that happened before they were here. Which is fair enough! It's a bit existential.
So the five-year-old's parents and his best friend's dad have been friends since they too were children. That is another concept difficult to grasp! Your parents were once your age. Everyone you know was once your age.
Even if I had been a stranger recruited off the street who stuck around, would it matter? I don't think so. It's just funny this web of relationships that they are oblivious to for a long time. Before words like 'grandma' or 'aunt' have any common definition, and everything just is. People who love them and can be relied on to help them, no matter how anyone got here.
Going to make a wider point about the definition of 'family'. Sometimes people ask me if I 'have a family.' And it's gotten to be so annoying I say "Well, yes, I did not spring from the ground fully formed." In a jokey way if I like them or need to have a further relationship. In a sterner way if not. What they are asking is, do I have kids. If you want to know whether I have kids, ask if I have kids. (Better yet: don't.)
The definition of 'family' is so much broader than that. Fluid and expansive and give me a cohort of aunties and vaguely defined cousins, a mathematically improbable number of grandparents. Families of action and care not dictionary definitions. My niblings don't care about the finer details of a family tree - they care I can fetch the biscuits down from where their mother has inconveniently hidden them out of reach. Anything else is neo-liberal patriarchal capitalist white people nonsense.
I really appreciate how the five-year-old knows that. At school he had to draw his family and he came home with a packed piece of paper with three generations, ghosts, his cousin who was still crawling at the time looking like a spider, neighbours, everyone's pets, and some Mario characters, with him and my wife stood at the top presiding over everyone. My kind of family, literally.