Self-Reliance

The roots of self-sufficiency?

Halle and Rosie the dog set out on an adventure. Photo Jim Baker

Thinking about self-sufficiency led to me to ask why some people are drawn towards it and others not. Does it come from the need to be self-reliant or from confidence to try things out oneself?

What you can’t see in the picture above are the people in Halle’s family - sisters, parents, grandparents, great grandparents - all involved in activities that maintain and strengthen loving support.

My father, front row second from the left.

On the face of it, throughout my childhood, I had two, three then four parents; mother, father, stepfather, stepmother. But I didn’t. My father was absent for months at a time. He served on a ship. In the picture he’s wearing “Whites”, uniform for a hot climate. I saw him so rarely I wasn’t able to judge if he really was the root of all the problems we experienced, “This wouldn’t have happened if your father was here”. My grandmother was the one constant in my early childhood, literally, my sole carer while my mother went to Australia when I was a toddler and came back when I was three. But at least, at that time, I shared a family name with my mother.

Around the time my parents divorced, my baby half brother arrived and I went to boarding school, I was seven. I came home for the holidays to a family with a different name, to a different village where I knew no-one. 

From then on I was the child from the first marriage. 

Would it have made a difference if I’d been adopted and shared the same name? Probably not as much as if I’d been able to call my stepfather “Daddy” or do the usual father/daughter things. Recently I was told, by someone who never met him, that my stepfather loved me. He certainly never said that to me, but then neither did anyone else apart from my grandmother. Hugs and declarations of affection were as rare as rocking horse droppings.

My father remarried and had two daughters, I saw them and my stepmother twice as a teenager. I shared a name with them but didn’t feel as though I had a right to be part of their family either, a feeling heightened by my exclusion from family events.

Excluded by one family and unwelcome in the other reinforced my isolation.

Thank you to Lucy Tunstall for her kind permission to quote her poem. It encapsulates why I needed to be self-reliant.

I was acutely aware of not fitting in at home and at school. The high points were holidays spent with my grandmother on my aunt and uncle’s farm. These were carefree and glorious although we were guests.

I felt different and often escaped into books. Reading Alice Miller’s “The Drama of Being a Child” makes me think I always knew that survival was down to me. That isn’t as dramatic as it sounds, but in my small way I’ve always tried to do things myself. Self-sufficiency is part of that strategy.

Does Lucy Tunstall’s poem chime with you?