The English have a card came called Happy Families. In the version we used to own, the deck consisted of different sets of cuddly animal relations. So, once the dealer had finished distributing cards, you might find yourself holding Mr. Badger, Granny Rat, a pair of Hedgehogs and a Mole or two. The object is to collect extended families by asking other players for the cards you need.
What makes the game both tricky and entertaining is a rule that enforces courtesy. The only way to extract a card from another player is by means of “Please” and “Thank you.”
Thus, if you want Mrs. Fox and suspect your father is holding her, you must ask him nicely. When he relinquishes her, you must thank him. If you don’t, you forfeit your turn. This is easy enough to remember in the early stages, but as play accelerates and the competition intensifies, it’s amazing how quickly people forget their manners.
There seem to me to be profound analogies in this gentle children’s amusement. If Tolstoy was right that all happy families are alike — and I think he was — the point of commonality surely must be the maintenance of an atmosphere of kindness, respect and courtesy. These are precious qualities, easy to generate but easier still to destroy. They require effort.
Just as it’s tempting to burst out in rude triumph when you’re about to smash the competition in a round of Happy Families, so too it’s dangerously easy to slip into teasing, mocking, bossing or undercutting the ones you love.
This sort of thing, once established, tends to run in families. It does not conduce to happiness. My own grandmother, whom I adored, had a disconcerting practice of praising and undermining in the course of a single paragraph — a tendency that produces habitual defensiveness in its victims. No doubt she’d been on the receiving end as a child; unfortunately, she passed it on to her children, who passed it on to my generation, and, though I can’t speak for my cousins, to this day I constantly battle to keep from replicating this unhelpful pattern of my forebears.
The best description I’ve read of what makes a happy family comes from the Swedish author Tove Jansson, whose “Moomin” books for children have been selling all over the world for more than 50 years. She told an interviewer that her books “started with my wanting to depict an unusually happy family: They are all fond of each other and give each other all the freedom they need; it is a harmonious family.”
To me that’s a beautiful and achievable idea: a loving family that gives its members the freedom they need.
Freedom doesn’t mean letting go, or atomizing the nuclear unit. It evokes a family culture in which each member enjoys the others for who they actually are, and assumes the best. It means home that is a mockery-free zone. In life, as in the children’s game, there’s no belittling trash talk in happy families.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
