Shooting Stars

By DAMIAN WEST

Let me spin a little yarn about this picture.

We’re all children here, Chris, Jared and I, but to me the picture speaks to the power of life trajectories and how family systems work – me the eldest, the carer, Jared the youngest, the footloose kid beaming, and Chris in the middle extending a football to the world to come play.

The picture reveals, I think. That’s how the typical sibling hierarchy plays out, and to that end it is what it is. But when you grow up in a family splintered by poverty and divorce, so too do the three children stars become splintered, scattered into hyperbolic universes that stretch and warp those almost genetic roles: the eldest enmeshed, the youngest highly goal focused, and the middle co-raised by his peers and the gritty streets of Brisvegas City, which, by the way is Australia’s New World City according to the marketing department of the Brisbane City Council and home to an upcoming Olympiad.

And as time has gone on and since our beloved Chris has passed, I see at last the best and worst of what family means. I suffer from addiction and an almost pre-pubescent mentality, Chris shot off to outer space to assume his place among the stars, and Jared has achieved enormous things but suffers the same pain.

Families are nightmare genetic biological social cultural constructs. But we’re all produced by them and most of us create them.

My reason for writing this is to instruct reasoning into the minds of any of you current or prospective parents out there: Give them way too much love. Make them feel fundamentally worthwhile. Channel their energies into things that you, as a wise old owl, see that they’re both good at and like heaps. And through all this, embark on an eternal process of setting them free.