Before Jonatan, my cousin and older brother (depending on how you choose to define the terms), left for his internship in Peru in January, he spent an afternoon lying on my bed, with me sitting on the floor, and we got to talking about Parenthood.
Parenthood is a TV show about the Braverman clan, the old patriarch and his wife, their four children and seven grandchildren. They live in the San Francisco Bay area, and their lives are uncommonly intertwined for being a modern day family. They have dinners and parties and get involved in each other’s business, they are nosy and opinionated and fight, have their small family dramas and make up again. In some ways, the family could be called dysfunctional, they have far too little respect for each other’s privacies and they are kind of co-dependent. But at the core of this is a strong, sometimes even desperate kind of love, messy and by no means perfect, a connectedness that overpowers all the obsticles.
As for the show, it always manages to surprise me. It isn’t very Hollywoody. There are no extreme illnesses, no catastrophies, no far-fetched intrigues. Just life, a little bit condensed, and the complicated relationships that develop between people when they really care for each other, especially when the people are a bit eccentric and quirky. The actors are great, the Californian surroundings where it is filmed are beautiful, the filming itself is unusually good for a TV show and the music is well tuned and really good too. Really, it is a good show.
And Jonatan agreed with me. He said: “It reminds me of our family. It reminds me of the Ruohomäki clan.” I could do nothing but agree.
Because that’s just how my family is. The four Finnish sisters who all moved to Stockholm from their tiny village in southern Finland, by way of London and Athens and Caracas, with their children and the occational brother coming over the Baltic sea for a visit. A little bit crazy, very emotional, nosy and loud, always fighting over something, never totally agreeing but always sticking to each other. I grew up in the middle of this, being an only child until I was 14, but never feeling really like it, because I had Lari and Jonatan as surrogate big brothers. The strong feeling of belonging I got with them growing up, is something that I’m still searching for with my adult friends, but I haven’t really found it yet. Not with a group, not like that. But it is a safety net I have – I know that I can always turn to my aunts and cousins and they will care and listen, no matter what I might have done or not done last week that hurt them or disappointed them or maybe just embarassed them. It is unconditional. Complicated and annoying and sometimes even hurtful, but unconditional.
So maybe that’s why we like Parenthood so much, Jonatan and I. Because we recognize ourselves and our family in it. For, in the end, the best way to touch someone with art and pop culture, is to let them see themselves.
Katja Malmborg 