The fierce struggle between loving and not loving, and letting go. Children included

Marriage, life as a couple, and family life are also a fierce struggle. Not the ferocity of violence, which is the negation of love, but that primordial force that arises when someone becomes irreplaceable to us. Procreation is fierce, because it pushes the body to its limits. Raising and caring for children is fierce: feeding them, looking after them, defending them not only from strangers, but even from those closest to us — grandparents, uncles and aunts, friends — when their affection becomes overbearing, judgemental or seeks to replace that of the parents. When it comes to the children’s welfare, compromise becomes almost impossible. It cannot be a half-measure, at least in the eyes of those who feel responsible for it. But it is precisely this certainty that can become dangerous: each parent ends up equating their child’s welfare with their own version of what is good. It is the point at which the power of care risks turning into domination. ‘Atto di famiglia’, the novel by Alessandra Carati (Neri Pozza), takes this tension to its extreme consequences: a couple who continue to fight each other in the name of their daughter, even after their separation. Carati portrays a proliferation of truths, each uttered in the name of the daughter’s best interests. First the father speaks, then the mother, and finally the daughter, now an adult. There is no neutral perspective to rely on: each reconstructs the story to defend themselves and assign responsibility for the breakdown to the other, but beneath these incompatible truths lies the little girl. Everyone claims to be acting for her; they end up turning her into the object of the dispute, the body upon which the family inscribes its separation.

Care thus carries within it a form of ferocity: that of someone who guards boundaries, weighs their words, interprets gestures, and constantly fears that something might harm what is most vulnerable. This caution also exists between partners. A couple is not merely about coming together, finding refuge, or intimacy. It is also a primal struggle to define spaces, share responsibilities, gain recognition, and avoid being swallowed up by the other’s needs. One struggles to draw closer and, at the same time, to maintain a distance. To be one without ceasing to be two. There is ferocity in working when one is tired, in giving in, in calculating, in anticipating what might be missing. There is ferocity in staying, when staying means bearing the weight of repetition and weathering together what wears one down; but there can also be ferocity in leaving, when parting becomes the only way not to succumb or to avoid dragging others into one’s own unhappiness. In the novel, it is not the separation itself that brings about the catastrophe. It is the inability to truly let go of the other: the couple breaks up, but the conflict continues through their daughter. Separating, then, does not mean severing the bond, but preserving its most destructive form. Yet the difficulty of letting go does not manifest itself only when a bond is broken. In an ambivalent form, it is also inscribed in the gestures through which we seek the other’s closeness. Even an embrace is not always merely tender. To embrace is to encircle the other’s body with one’s arms: to welcome them, certainly, but also to hold them back, to prevent them from moving away. Perhaps two impulses coexist in every embrace: to offer shelter and to block an escape. The family is thus the arena in which tenderness retains something animalistic: we love with the fear of losing, we protect with the risk of suffocating, we stay with the fear of being imprisoned, and we leave while taking with us what we would like to leave behind. Ferocity is not the opposite of love; it is its dangerous shadow, arising from the fear of losing what, in loving, we have recognised as necessary to our existence.