Greater than the Sum of its Parts...

US drama at its best!

I have been captivated by ‘This is Us’, a US drama, hidden away on Channel 4. It tells the story of a family and how their present is impacted on by events in the past. But ‘family’ is the thread that runs through it, making me laugh and cry, feel uplifted or sad.

It got me thinking about how our experiences as children directly affect us as adults. 

My parents lost their first child to leukaemia two years to the day before I was born. She was ten, and my parents never got over the loss of their much loved daughter.But their answer was to draw my sister, myself and my two brothers close to them, to protect us and make sure that we had the best possible childhood. We didn't have much money, never had a car or expensive holidays but we had time with our parents and created memories that have sustained us over the years. 

Glorious family memories

Both my parents came from big families, so we had any number of aunts, uncles and cousins within our extended family. Some were, naturally, closer than others but the family parties were legendary and we still talk about them today. We all grew up feeling valued, loved and believing that we were capable of anything. My parent’s legacy was four strong, independently thinking individuals, a direct result of our upbringing. Through good times and bad, we know we can always turn to one another when we need to.

Families today can sometimes be highly complicated, with divorce and separation much more common, and families joined together in different ways. My grand-daughter (or more accurately, my step-grand-daughter) has taken all of her five years to get her head around the different combinations of grandparents at her disposal, and hopefully will take on the burden of explaining it all to her little brother when he starts to ask about it!

When I thought about writing this post, my starting point was that families are akin to a jigsaw puzzle, a myriad of small pieces that fit together to make a singular image. But as I considered it further I realised that, if that were the case, families would never interlink and overlap, and these days they clearly do. I really feel that families are much more like a patchwork - individual pieces of fabric that are joined together, each dependent on one another, touching each other at different points and capable of growing exponentially. 

A never ending patchwork!

When I met my now husband our patchworks were separate and had grown independently of one another. Over time we worked to stitch them together into a whole. It wasn't easy, and we have had to do some unpicking and restitching over the years, but now we each love our step children as our own, and appreciate the richness and colour they each bring to the patchwork of our family lives. I like to think that they feel the same way about us.

My lovely, loony patchwork family!

Textiles need conservation and care - pieces of patchwork may fade and begin to disintegrate without efforts to preserve them. Although my parents are no longer with us, by talking about them and continuing with family traditions and rituals, by looking at photos and remembering their values, we keep them alive to us, and their fabric pieces shine bright - my mum’s would be a rose print, and my dad’s the serge of a St John’s Ambulance uniform. 

Some materials undoubtedly clash, needing careful positioning, and similarly, families can be hard work. However, in these changing times, their value should not be underestimated. It’s so important to work on keeping the connections of our families strong by constantly paying them attention, renewing the thread if needs be. 

Whether its a patchwork, a jigsaw or a family, the whole will always be greater than the sum of its parts, and its important to remember that a neglected or misused quilt will very quickly become a pile of useless rags.