What Makes a Family?

The normal life of this summer has started to change - steadily and definitely.

Laura is moving to St Petersburg. Today. Tomorrow she needs to attend some lectures at the university. I miss the moments we have spent in various cafés talking about this and that.

Laura belongs to the very few people whom know to see the world with an authentic curiosity and who are able to look at their own curiosity with curious eyes. The enjoyable outcome of that is joyous and repetitive laughter you can join in when in her company.

Samuli is getting ready to go to Bosnia tomorrow. He has packed his summer life spent mostly in Grandmother´s cottage. Now he is waiting to be in big enough of a hurry to get to Helsinki by train. His car prefers summer life. It does not want to start. In fact, it should know that the distance from the cottage to the side of our house is just one kilometre. It must prefer hot and dry summer weather to this rainy and grey autumn Sunday and the ones coming after this.

Luckily the clouds go by. I just received a message from a friend of mine congratulating me for my name day - el santo in Spanish. However, our Finnish names seldom have any reference to any saints and if they had we would not recognize it. This is due to the fact that, by defintion, being Protestants we are in the continous process of protesting. No matter what you say or suggest, we start thinking and finding out how to think and do that particular thing in a different way. And it is not enough just to think and do differently, we also need to be able to explain the logic for the choices made.

According to European Union plans and decisions we are now spending a special year of intercultural dialogue. There is an interesting article in today´s paper referring to this topic. The author, Olli Löytty, states that we can have various kinds of arrangements that facilitate intercultural dialogue. For instance, we can have festivals where Finns drink alcohol, Germans eat bratwurst, and people from Senegal beat drums. We can also have multimedia art happenings where Karita Mattila sings, Osmo Rauhala paints art and Juha Seppälä writes texts.

Intercultural dialogue is absolutely possible as far as we define ´culture´narrowly enough. But if we take the concept of culture to cover what we consider to be the normal way of life, intercultural dialogue becomes problematic, if not totally impossible. If culture means, for instance that Christian people - and especially us Protestants in the north - work hard, Muslims demonstrate fanatically and Jews count the money, then peaceful intercultural dialogue is no more possible.

Cultural differences exist. They are concrete. They awaken immediate and often uncontrollable reactions. I´ll take an example: We had the very great pleasure of learning to know a Chinese family. We became good friends. Their son Ang grew up together with my own children. They played folk music together, had their own orchestra etc.

Once the children were having lunch at my kitchen table. I asked if anybody wanted to have some more. "Yes please. I´ll have some more, if I can eat in Chinese. But if I have to eat in Finnish, I just can´t have any more." Antti said.

"Antti, please, eat in Finnish!" my own ten-year-old son demanded. If you ever have read Calvin and Hobbes, you know what it means to teach acceptable table manners to little boys. By that age my son had obviously internalized some bits and pieces of good table manners. I was satisfied, of course. - However, Antti having spent a lot of time outside of his own Chinese family-culture, had learnt two alternative ways to behave. He was able to make choices in accordance with the current enviroment.

Samuli got his rucksacks made and left for Bosnia. He´ll work there until Christmas, at least. Seela is coming back from Argentina at the end of this month. She comes home and probably goes to live on her own, somewhere in town. "Have you some disagreements with your mother?" she had been asked in Argentina when she had told that she does not necessarily live at home.

What is there behind and below that question? Cultural differences. Different definitions of what we mean by proper family life. In Finland physical presence does not necessarily belong to the nuclear concept of proper family life after children have passed their teens. Having some important things in common does. What is important depends on the requirements of every specific moment. I have received phone calls from Italy and Norway that have made the concepts of family unity and proper motherhood very clear - and dear - to me.

One example from Italy: "Mother, please I do not have enough money for the bus ticket now. Could you put some money into my bank account. The bus is just arriving."
Another example from Norway: "Mother, please what do we need to do to give a lecture that everybody would listen to and take part in? Previously outstanding experts have been lecturing about very important topics and people have not paid attention to them. How can we improve the situation? "

Vow, have I felt being a proper mother when reacting to those and other similar requests!

Families are of many kinds. One definition for a family used by Finnish social workers is very matter-of-fact: people who use the same refrigerator are considered to form a family.

As my family lives in different countries and continents, that definition does not suit to us. We need a new definition. To tell the truth, I´m presently testing a new definition. My lovely and lovable daughter says: "We are a family, because we read the same blog in the Internet."