Amongst my treasures is a bag of my mother's and grandmother's recipes. In this I found a little notebook with the quantities required to make marmalade. The front yard of our block of flats has a grapefruit tree, so I decided that I would have a go at making a batch. First of all I gathered some jars. Some we already had, but I bought some more cheap jars from the Salvation Army. Many of these jars had labels attached, and it turned out to be quite a performance to remove them. They were soaked and scrubbed and in the end had to use a citrus oil concoction to remove them.
I explored the concept of labelling in my last post with regards to sexual identity, but finding identity is many faceted. My recent learning at university has been that the 'sense of self' is never truly established, but is an ongoing process. That was good to know. But what I have also learned is that people like to make order of the world, so will label things the way they see them according to the 'rules' that exist in the culture they live in.
Between us, Nyah and I have eight children, and she has eight grandchildren. With her children grown, she didn't want to 'parent' again, but is happy to share our home with my children part of every other week. I take care of the parenting in terms of sorting school things, taking kids on outings, putting them to bed, and she offers support by backing up my instructions and actions.
In some ways our family is unusual in that it doesn't fit the socially endorsed nuclear family of mum, dad and 2.5 children. This model is probably in the minority (a book I read suggested that in the UK the traditional nuclear family makes up only 7% of all family units) and even our 'unconventional' arrangement has labels. Statistics NZ would call us a 'non-blended step family.' Te Ara - The Encyclopedia of New Zealand defines a family where a parent's new partner doesn't parent as a 'recombined family' For a while we even struggled with the term 'partner' because our relationship was so new. There seems to be missing language when it comes to families and relationships.
As our relationship became more familiar to family and friends, they started making labels for us. Nyah took her granddaughter out for her birthday, and they had a conversation about her father's partner - whom she referred to as her step-mother. Then she said "You're a step-mum too, eh Nana?"
My daughter's friend came to play, and concluded that if Nyah and I got married, then Nyah would be my daughter's step-mother, but at the moment they were just friends.
Everyone wants labels for what they are looking at. I have become a 'lesbian mature student' (according to a family member) and Nyah has suddenly become a 'step-mother' to a gaggle of small children the same age as her grandchildren. Maybe those labels will work for us eventually, but that's really something only we can decide, not everyone else (other than Statistics NZ, apparently). But it looks like we have to accept that people will give us labels that suit what they are seeing, not what we actually are.
The instructions say that once the marmalade is made, the jars are to be sterilised and the marmalade is to be poured into them.
They are to sit for a while and cool.
Then they can have a label put on and the jars house something new.
NB: To date I have not actually managed to make marmalade. My unlabelled jars sit in the bag on the kitchen floor, and the grapefruit are still on the tree. Maybe next weekend....
NB: To date I have not actually managed to make marmalade. My unlabelled jars sit in the bag on the kitchen floor, and the grapefruit are still on the tree. Maybe next weekend....
