All in the family

I have an extra child. Did you know? At least, I do for the next two months. She’s from Japan, on exchange. There is nothing like the effect of having somebody to stay at your house to make you stop and think about the way you do things as a family. All those little routines and habits are brought into sharp relief when you are forced to explain them to someone else. I don’t usually have to think about it, but it’s at the front of my mind now—what do we look like as a family?

Take socks, for example. I don’t really have a system for socks. Socks baffle me. It’s the start of the school year, so I suppose that means I’m supposed to buy more? But surely that is just compounding the problem? Surely that is just feeding the insatiable sock beast that has taken over my house?

I am giving my exchange student a cultural experience. Australian chaos. Soak it up, International Teen. You are welcome.

I try to keep on top of it. Well, I don’t try hard. I’ve given up trying to deliver socks to each child’s sock drawer. No. My kids tend to put their shoes on by the front door anyway, so I have a large basket of socks there. They’re everyone’s socks. All sizes and styles. But they are all in pairs, because I am not an animal. There is an even larger bag full of odd socks, which is supposed to live in the laundry but consistently gets dragged out to sit beside the other sock basket for early-morning excavations.

My 14-year-old complains that he has no socks to wear. Zero. Any socks in the Sock Pit of Doom are small and pink. My 14-year-old has feet the size of artisanal loaves of bread.

I add ‘socks’ to the shopping list, then pause. Grabbing a broom from the laundry, I walk to his room. It turns out the underside of his bed is 100 per cent sock.

I feel guilty for immersing my host daughter in mess and confusion, but tidiness is one of those ideals I’ve never managed to master. Perhaps I should look at things differently. I am giving my exchange student a cultural experience. Australian chaos. Soak it up, International Teen. You are welcome.

February is the month of the Holy Family. I often like to reflect on what sort of family the Holy Family was. Like, if they were to have a house guest come to stay, what would they look like from the outside? It’s easy to think of Mary, Joseph and young Jesus as sort of static. They were all either saintly or divine. Surely they just floated through life smiling at each other?

Like Mary, I can meet Christ and reflect his love in the ordinary acts of service that make up family life. Small acts of love, performed imperfectly, still count for so much.

But this just doesn’t seem real to me. Jesus was still a human child. His parents were human too. Highly intelligent and sensitive kids aren’t always easy to parent. Did eight-year-old Jesus talk incessantly about the first-century equivalent of Pokemon when Mary was just trying to get dinner on the table? Did Joseph make a weird noise when he ate soup? Did Mary ever struggle to keep on top of things?

There are times when the household tasks and management seem endless, and what’s more, I’m no good at them. I am on a stumbling treadmill of cooking and cleaning and scout badge sewing and excursion form approval and textbook buying and meal planning and calendar checking and the crucial procurement of lunchbox snacks. It doesn’t feel like there is any time for prayer and spirituality. At times like this, it helps to remember Mary in the thick of it. She would have felt swamped sometimes too. Plus, she didn’t have a robot vacuum cleaner. I’m not completely across my Middle Eastern history, but I’m almost certain of this fact.

Like Mary, I can meet Christ and reflect his love in the ordinary acts of service that make up family life. Small acts of love, performed imperfectly, still count for so much.

I unfurl a large thick sock so that a small measure of grit falls out. It’s gross, but I console myself that the deposit of dirt has been put through a warm regular cycle with a cold rinse. It is clean dirt.

Standing in my backyard, washing basket at my feet, I unfurl a large thick sock so that a small measure of grit falls out, most probably gathered on the patch of earth beside the trampoline and untouched by the washing machine’s efforts in its inside-out cocoon.

It’s gross, but I console myself that the deposit of dirt has been put through a warm regular cycle with a cold rinse. It is clean dirt.

As I reach to the bottom of the basket for the last item to peg out, a summer uniform dress, I spot an old grey sock in the garden. It must have fallen off the washing line a while ago. Actually, I don’t think it even is a grey sock. At least, it wasn’t one to begin with. Grey is just the colour of its mouldering. It is fast becoming one with the undergrowth. I should probably try to identify it, then I can fish its mate out of the odd socks basket. I would know for sure that its mate is now permanently and irrevocably odd. So I can get rid of it. But how? I can’t donate a single sock. Nobody would want to buy a single sock. But—what? Should I put it in the bin? That just seems wrong too. Maybe I’ll leave it. Just for now.

The Holy Family would have been a wonderful family (and they still are, sure, don’t come at me with theology, but I’m talking specifically about when they were on earth). I think they would have been a family full of humour and warmth, welcoming to outsiders, mindful of the vulnerable people in their community. And they would have got along together so well. The Immaculate Conception of Mary, saintliness of Joseph and full divinity of Jesus must have contributed a lot to family harmony in their home in first-century Galilee.

But they also lived in a time before socks. Surely that must have helped?