Dreaming at the Table Dreaming at the Table
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“Peasant Family at the Table”, Jozef Israëls, 1882
Good Mood

Dreaming at the Table

Developing Closeness Within the Family
Magdalena Róża Skoczewska
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time 6 minutes

Closeness within the family doesn’t just happen; it’s the fruit of hard work. We long for the family idyll, but rather than take matters into our own hands, we prefer to sit at the table dreaming about happiness, which we usually don’t allow ourselves or others to experience.

Family can offer the allure of immortality: having biological children operates in the subconscious as a partial victory over death. That’s why we often treat our progeny as an ‘extension’ of ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as at the same time we remember that children are separate entities and give them respect. The problem begins when we’re not aware that we need something from them that we can’t do for ourselves, or when we get angry at them for something that we don’t really like in ourselves. In that case, we’re most often dealing with one of two behaviours: either we’re ‘attaching ourselves’ to our descendants, to have the closest possible contact with ‘potential immortality’, or we’re ‘rejecting’ the child, to push away the fear of losing them. In both situations,

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Photo by Tatiana Rodriguez on Unsplash
Good Mood

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Miha Mazzini

A wonderful sunny day in the park. I sat on a bench, was about to reach for my phone, but realized that the day was simply too beautiful and instead stared at the branches above. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a mother with her baby sat on the next bench along and I briefly glanced towards them before returning to slowly, gently breathing in the late spring.

I suppose I should have picked up on the sounds, but I admit that I didn’t. The child was communicating with its mother and the mother was responding with some sort of “ahm, yes, ahm”, more like an official who you happen to have disturbed in the middle of some important task. When I finally began paying attention and looked over at them, the child in the high pushchair was fighting with its hand, face and entire body for its mother’s attention. You know – smiles, frowns, pulling faces and getting upset. The mother responded, but somehow absently – that was what I first thought – with a kind of delay, almost wrongly. There was something odd about the scene and I didn’t understand exactly what until I stood up. Her crossed leg meant I hadn’t seen that the mother was not looking at the baby but at her phone, clearly engrossed in some deep exchange of messages or, judging by her twitching thumb, flicking through Instagram. Her reactions were a mixture of both (very many) responses to the screen and (very few) to her offspring.

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