Family Estrangement, December, and the Family of Things

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” is poetry’s equivalent of Pachelbel’s Canon in D - overused to within an inch of its life. I don’t care. Both are wildly popular because they are beautiful; simple enough to speak widely; complex enough to hold and engage. “You do not have to crawl on your knees repenting” is the line I’d like to live in the coming year. And this year, more than ever before, I found my place in “the family of things”.

More often than not, I forget to say that it’s Clare writing this article - but maybe it’s obvious from the different ways Kim and I write, and the things we say. For example - I want to tell you about how, decades ago, one of my girlfriends complained about the way I spoke about my family. It’s always THE family, she said – like it’s a unit. The Family is coming. I’m spending time with The Family. Like there’s no other family! Like you don’t exist without it!

But, I was the youngest of six - a Catholic family - and we were a unit. We were cubs, we moved and lived and rested in a pile. We had our own bible, our own lore. We shared our underwear, changed once a week and washed by hand, we bathed in the same water, smelled of each other, caught lice and worms from each other, ate choddy from each other’s mouths. The Family was my horizon and furthest place; the Family was much more than world. It was my fingers, my thoughts and all my dreams. It was my arterial system and my exoskeleton; my tastebuds and my lens. What do you do when your systems all fall apart?

Family estrangement and separation is not uncommon. I was almost completely estranged from my family for the six years before my mother’s death in 2019, when I restarted a tentative and partial relationship with two siblings. Leaving my family was entirely the right thing to do, necessary for my sanity and my child’s safety. But it felt like a form of emotional amputation. The pain was bewildering, and I felt less like a body without a limb, than a limb without its body.

It eases. I live a rich life now, full of love. But I never feel entirely whole. Some days, the alone-ness echoes through everything I do. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m determined to find community in poetry. It’s certainly part of why I write – to reach out, to feel myself part of something. After all, poetry – like all literature - only exists because two people - the reader and the writer - agree to enter into an intimate relationship with each other. And as well as the community of words, I feel myself - more and more - as part of the wider physical world; moss and trees roots; the curves of a familiar green lane through a field; the mouths of lichen like tiny trumpets; the big arms of mountains; the sleeping and vulnerable moor.

But of course, like any life-changing injury, there are times it hurts. December, for the love of God, does not just mean Christmas, and Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve; it also brings my birthday – which is also the anniversary of my father’s death - and my daughter’s birthday. For other people, it means Hannukah, and Thanksgiving, and a million other evocations and reminders. It’s an emotional lens which magnifies togetherness and loneliness and grief and basically, all of the feels, at the time of cold days and long nights.

Tomorrow, our paid subscribers are invited to join us online at 6pm for an hour’s poetry workshop, for free. If any of our free subscribers are feeling the need for some poetry togetherness but can’t afford a subscription, just drop send a message via this Substack - and I’ll send you the link. Plus we’re meeting every day through January for Writing Hours. If you want to be part of a writing community every morning but you’re short of cash, please our “Pay what you can” option, or apply for a free bursary. We don’t ask for information or documentation - if you say you need it, then that’s good enough for us. Please note - if you’d like to sign up for January Writing Hours, or to apply for a bursary, you need to contact us via this link rather than via this substack.

Finally, I’ll be online tomorrow from 5.30. Turn up early if you’d like a chat and a mince pie. And until then, on behalf of me and Kim, and the moors and mountains and moss, I’m sending love.