The family you come from
If you're the sort of person with a universally wildly happy family, no troubled or strained relationships with your perfect siblings, you have wise and loving parents who strike the perfect balance between kindness and concern without interference and won't ever need any help as they get older, and you always know what to do in any circumstance, then you won't see the need for this chapter at all. You can skip reading it and just get on with life, soaking like a tea bag in a happy cup of convivial relations and enjoying life with your pet unicorn called Barbara.
This chapter looks at the family you come from: how to navigate difficult relationships with them, care for elderly relatives, and deal with in-laws.
The family you make
The definition of family can include a big extended family with all available second cousins and great-grandpappies on deck, or a streamlined unit of one parent, a kid and a budgerigar called Gail. Some people go through life meandering through a rambling series of blended families with all sorts of curious cupboards for hidden relatives and long-lost half-aunties. Families can be joyous and dysfunctional, our greatest sanctuary or the mess we have to recover from to make our own way in life.
In this chapter we'll call a truce in the false wars between stay-at-home mums and those in paid work, take a brief squiz at parenting littlies and teens, and give a helping hand in matters of separation, divorce, blended and stepfamilies. So, as my nanna used to say, 'RINSO!', which stands for: 'Right. Inside. No showing off.'
Friends
Some of us are still in the same 'clique' with the same people we knew at primary school, complete with decades-old dynamics and a photographic history of hilarious hairstyles. Some of us choose instead on the last ever day of school to run, without a backward glance, full-stretch and directly at the nearest horizon like a joyous whippet.
Lots of us are sustained by being close to other women, but at the same time many of us are perplexed by friendships that seem all one-way (she complains, you listen; she's always late, you wait) or has run its course (you've run out of things to talk about or you don't agree with any of her decisions any more) or is even poisonous (she behaves like a taunted taipan in a bag).
In this chapter we explore what makes a good friend, meanness and bullying, getting out of good friendships gone bad and how to make new friends.