Teaching your kids by fighting with your spouse

Fighting with compassion is a crucial life skill. Also, I have Covid :-(

Hello Friends of the Global Jigsaw,

I’m writing this post feeling slightly delirious having tested positive for COVID yesterday. After dodging bullets for 2 years, I am finally felled.

It feels like a really terrible cold:  sore throat, low fever, headache and exhaustion. So, I’m just binging on Bridgerton (anyone else miss the count?), taking paracetamol and drinking lots of fluids.

My husband is traveling till late next week. Not great timing since it means I am solo parenting while sick. All of which brings me to today’s post in a roundabout way.

If you look at the range of my writing, much of it has been framed by parenthood. In both practical and less tangible ways, being a mother has shaped how much time I have to work, to think, to be. My brain has been rendered prismatic (that’s “shattered” in less pretty terms). It has lost single-beam focus.

Motherhood has shaped the lens through which I look at the world and interpret it. It has convinced me of the wrongness of the boundaries between the personal and the political, the domestic and the public that the public intellectual has long embodied.

The moment you start talking about babies, its like half one’s audience – men – lose interest. Not because they are not parents, but because being a father seems to figure lower in the taxonomy of identity for most men, than being a mother does in the taxonomy of identity for most women.

(An aside: forgive me- Covid brain. I always suspected that women read men, but men don’t read women. There is now data to confirm this: For the top 10 bestselling female authors (including Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women.)

I would love to have your thoughts on the implications of this asymmetry and also on its origins? Why don’t more men read women novelists? And why does this matter?

This week’s post moves from the personal to the universal in positing how arguing with your spouse in front of your children might be the key to a less polarized world. Cannot think of a more universal topic.

My spouse and I have been together for more than 21 years. We have spent these decades arguing our way across the multiple countries - China, Belgium, Indonesia, Japan and Spain – that we have lived in.

The first year that we began dating as students at university in London, we went to a café in Bloomsbury for a bite to eat. Even as we chomped down on paninis, we ended up getting so heated with each other over a disagreement on how China should handle Tibet that an elderly gentleman sitting on a nearby table became exceedingly irate. He showily folded the newspaper he’d been reading and huffed his way over to us. “Thank you for destroying my morning,” he’d said icily, before stomping out while muttering, “I’d been trying to have a peaceful coffee.”

Fast forward a couple of decades and a few days ago Russia and NATO had us so riled with each other that the friend we were having a drink with at a bar in Madrid, asked if we spoke like this in front of our children as well. And if so, whether they ever worried that we’d get divorced.

We did. And they didn’t.

***

It is conventional wisdom that parents should present a calm, impregnable, united front before their children. That they shouldn’t fight within earshot of them, keeping any disagreements private. In this, my husband and I, are spectacular failures.

 It’s not as though we only debate world issues, we also squabble about the mundane, you-forgot-to-buy-the-cat-food-again, variety of universal marital resentments. In regular games of family blame-pong, he says I am overly anxious, and I say he doesn’t plan enough. We even disagree on the boundaries we set for the boys. Julio is far more laissez faire than me when it comes to screen time, but I am more forgiving of their habitual foot dragging while getting dressed for school in the morning.

None of these conversations happen in hushed tones, behind closed doors, after the children are asleep. They are daylight-drenched broadcasts that form part of the humdrum aural backdrop of our family life. But - and herein lies the significant bit - so are the make ups and the little gestures of big love that frame the squabbles. The cup of chamomile tea that my husband might bring me, unsolicited but so perfectly timed, while I’m reading in bed. The dentist appointment I take a break in arguing with him to make - for him.  Those moments when we are in complete agreement – on the importance of pluralism, on the need for forging one’s own path through life, on the kids practicing piano.

For my boys, disagreements are normalized. They understand that arguments need not end in catastrophe. Fights exist so that compromises can be found. They know that divergences can be tolerated, even in the long term, without the need for any final solution. They have been shown that agreeing to disagree is a powerful form of empathy.

Their mother is not long-suffering. Their father does not seethe in silence. Sometimes their parents are angry, after all they are human. They may even hate each other momentarily, but they love each other constantly. Our boys know that love does not need agreement. That a person is not loved merely because they are pleasing. That reaching across boundaries is harder, but more rewarding than living a life circumscribed by an uncrossed border.

The story of every marriage, and every family, is one of War and Peace.  There can be no peace without war. We’re doing our children a disservice if we have them believing that relationships are about perfect consonance. A marriage should be like a democracy, rather than an authoritarian regime: a place where dissent is valued over enforced harmony.

Within a marriage, fighting is a ritualized performance. It can be damaging, of course, but if handled well, it is a safe space within which to enact and process the frustrations of the outside world. For children, learning how to fight with compassion is a crucial life skill.

The world today is a polarized one. It is plagued by culture wars, fake news and social media trolls. What’s needed to heal some of these ruptures is the ability to break out of ideological silos and to engage with those whom with we disagree. This may not make us agree with them but learning to “fight” our opponents well - vehemently, but not violently and with at least a soupçon of humour - is an art desperately needed in global public discourse. One that could perhaps take a leaf or two out of the book of every successful marriage.

*****

Hope you enjoyed this. Please do consider subscribing if you did. And as usual, share share share. I am off to bed. Hope to be much better by the time you hear from me next.

In the while, stay safe and read some novels by women :-)

Pallavi