DOMESTIC BLISS: WHAT EXACTLY WERE WE PROMISED?
DOMESTIC BLISS was not conceived as an illustration of a theory I already had in mind. I began working with the material in one of those states in which making comes before explanation, allowing one form to suggest another until a face appeared, another figure became necessary, and eventually a relationship between three people began to emerge. My observations of families, relationships, parenting and the enormous difference between what people say publicly and what they sometimes experience privately had accumulated for years, but I did not sit down intending to translate any particular conclusion into sculpture. I was discovering the scene while making it.
By the time the three figures had appeared, I was looking at a mother, a father and a child who contained all the conventional ingredients of what we are taught to recognise as a happy family, while their expressions and their relationship to one another suggested a considerably more complicated experience.
That contradiction eventually gave the work its title.
CHILDREN ARE HAPPINESS
“Children are happiness” is one of those statements repeated so frequently that questioning its meaning can sound almost offensive.
The idea comes from many directions. Families repeat it, culture reinforces it, friends reproduce it, images of successful adulthood incorporate it, and people themselves may repeat it without examining whether the phrase accurately describes their own experience. For many, becoming a parent belongs to a familiar sequence in which finding a partner, creating a home and having children are expected to produce a particular form of fulfilment.
There are people for whom parenthood genuinely becomes an extraordinary source of happiness and meaning, and there are families in which relationships between parents and children remain warm, generous and deeply satisfying. There are also people whose experience contains exhaustion, financial pressure, resentment, grief for a previous life, changes in a relationship they never anticipated and feelings they may be frightened to admit even to themselves.
The difficulty begins when only one of these experiences is considered socially acceptable to describe.
A parent can say that a child is the greatest happiness of their life and receive immediate understanding. Saying that becoming a parent was considerably more difficult than expected, that parts of a previous life are deeply missed, or that love for a child exists alongside regret can provoke an entirely different response.
Perhaps repeating the approved version is sometimes easier than examining the distance between what a person was promised and what they actually experience.
“WELCOME TO HELL”
There is a peculiar change in language that I have heard repeatedly around prospective and new parents.
Before the child arrives, people congratulate them, share their excitement and speak about the beautiful experience ahead. After the baby is born, some of the same experienced parents suddenly allow themselves another joke: “Welcome to hell.”
The joke works because the people making it recognise something in one another's experience. What interests me is the timing. If there is an entire layer of parenthood difficult enough to produce this shared humour, why does so much of that conversation become socially comfortable only after the decision has already been made?
Parenthood can alter finances, bodies, careers, relationships, homes, priorities, identity and the basic ownership of one's time. It is difficult to think of many decisions with comparable consequences that are discussed beforehand through such a narrow emotional vocabulary.
Greater honesty would not necessarily discourage people from becoming parents. It might allow more people to understand what they are actually choosing and to enter the experience with fewer promises that no human being can guarantee.
YOU DO NOT KNOW WHO IS COMING
There is something deliberately uncomfortable about comparing parenthood with purchasing something that was advertised in a particular way, but the discomfort exposes an interesting expectation.
In most consequential decisions we try to understand what we are committing to. Parenthood offers remarkably few guarantees because the central variable is another human being.
A person may be loving, intelligent, financially prepared and genuinely committed to being a good parent. They may create a beautiful environment and make every decision with care, yet none of this allows them to select the temperament, abilities, health, desires, difficulties or future values of the person who arrives.
This uncertainty became embodied in the child in DOMESTIC BLISS. His face looks almost devilish, but I do not see him as an evil child. For me, his expression contains the radical unpredictability of another human being whose existence cannot be designed according to the expectations of the people who created him.
The mother looks at him with hope, attachment, sadness and perhaps the remains of an imagined future that she is still trying to locate inside the reality in front of her. The father seems to have reached another stage of recognition and has already begun to move away, psychologically and physically, from the centre of the scene.
Neither response makes either parent the villain. They are three people living through the consequences of the same event from three different positions.
A FAMILY IS NOT A SINGLE EXPERIENCE
From outside, we describe three or four people with one convenient word: family. Inside that word are several separate consciousnesses experiencing the same years in completely different ways.
The mother may believe that there is still a version of the promised happiness available if she gives enough, loves enough, waits long enough or tries hard enough. The father may already have accepted that the life he imagined is not the life unfolding in front of him. The child is developing according to a trajectory that belongs to him and may eventually have very little to do with either parent's original expectations.
The strange expression on the father's face emerged during the making of the sculpture without being carefully designed in advance. There is a slight smile in it, but I do not read it as happiness or amusement. It has something of the expression a person can acquire when a situation has become sufficiently clear that there is no longer much point pretending not to understand it.
The mother has not necessarily arrived at the same conclusion, and this difference creates another kind of distance between them. They remain physically connected by the family structure while their internal experiences begin moving in different directions.
WHOSE HAPPINESS IS THE CHILD RESPONSIBLE FOR?
Once a child is described as a source of happiness, another question becomes difficult to avoid: whose happiness is this new person expected to provide?
A child never agreed to repair a relationship, give an adult's life meaning, remain emotionally close forever, share the parents' values, fulfil their unrealised ambitions or compensate them for the years and resources invested in raising them. Yet these expectations can develop without ever being formally acknowledged.
A parent may genuinely adore a child and still build so much of their emotional life around that relationship that the child's eventual separation becomes threatening. Intense closeness may be described as evidence of exceptional love while leaving very little space for either person to develop relationships outside that bond.
This can happen between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, and in many other configurations. The specific arrangement matters less to me than the question underneath it: at what point does loving another person become expecting that person to organise their life around maintaining our emotional stability?
Saying that a child is “my whole world” can sound deeply loving, while being somebody's entire world can also become an enormous responsibility to carry.
THE CHILD WHO FAILED TO MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS
People sometimes speak about children who did not meet their expectations, and the phrase itself deserves examination because the expectations existed in somebody's imagination before the child was capable of having any opinion about them.
Parents may imagine personality, education, profession, interests, relationships, values or a particular form of closeness long before the child becomes an adult. The actual person gradually emerges with a temperament and direction of their own, and the distance between these two versions can become painful.
A daughter may want a life her mother never imagined for her. A son may reject his father's values. A child may have needs nobody anticipated or become far more independent than the family expected. The disappointment experienced by a parent can be completely genuine, but the original expectation still belonged to the parent rather than to the person expected to fulfil it.
Perhaps one of the most difficult parts of raising another human being is investing enormous amounts of oneself while accepting that the eventual outcome cannot be owned.
THERE MAY BE NO PERFECT PARENTING
Parenthood also contains a peculiar impossibility because almost any decision can later be interpreted from several directions.
A child given enormous attention may eventually describe the parent as controlling, while another who received considerable independence may remember emotional absence. One adult may wish their parents had pushed them harder, while another may spend years recovering from the pressure to achieve. A parent can make decisions sincerely, carefully and lovingly without being able to control how those decisions will eventually be understood by another consciousness.
There will probably still be something to discuss with a psychologist.
I find this more interesting than the fantasy that sufficiently correct parenting can manufacture an adult who will eventually look backwards and approve every decision made on their behalf.
Parents act with the knowledge, resources, emotional development and circumstances available to them at a particular point in time. Years later, their child evaluates the same events from another age, another personality and another position in the story.
Complete agreement may never have been a realistic objective.
WHAT HAPPENS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS?
Families are remarkably capable of producing convincing representations of themselves.
A photograph can contain a beautiful home, smiling parents, attractive children, holidays, birthdays and evidence of a life that appears to fit the cultural description of success. Social media has made these representations easier to produce and easier to compare.
The photograph tells us almost nothing about what happens after it has been taken.
We do not know which couple barely speaks when the children are asleep, which parent privately regrets the decision to have children, who feels displaced by the relationship between their partner and child, who has become frightened by their own resentment, or who genuinely feels that family life has exceeded everything they hoped for.
All of these people may be capable of producing almost identical photographs.
The difference between public language and private experience can become particularly painful when nobody is prepared to acknowledge that the difference exists. A person then compares the full complexity of their own home with carefully selected evidence from everybody else's.
More honest conversations would not produce one universal conclusion about parenthood. They would allow more than one experience to exist without immediately converting it into a moral judgment.
WHY CALL IT DOMESTIC BLISS?
The title reflects the extraordinary distance that can exist between an immaculate cultural promise and a private human experience.
Domestic bliss is beautifully packaged as an idea. A particular arrangement of partner, home and children is expected to produce a recognisable emotional reward, and the promise is repeated so confidently that people may continue using its language even while their own experience bears very little resemblance to it.
The sculpture places that promise in front of three people who cannot guarantee it for one another.
The mother carries her hopes and grief into her relationship with the child. The father has already begun to recognise and respond to a reality he may never have imagined when the decision was made. The child has arrived with his own nature and his own future, carrying no obligation to become the person either parent expected.
I am not interested in deciding which of them is right, nor in using the sculpture to argue for or against having children. I am interested in giving physical form to one of the conversations that becomes difficult precisely because the socially approved answer has already been supplied.
Children are not inherently happiness or unhappiness. They are life continuing through another person, and life arrives with love, attachment, pleasure, illness, fear, responsibility, conflict, beauty, disappointment, separation, loss and experiences nobody can predict in advance.
Perhaps the more responsible question is therefore not whether children bring happiness, but what a person is genuinely prepared to give to another life without requiring that life to fulfil an advertisement.
Behind the closed doors of every family is an experience that outsiders cannot completely know, regardless of how convincing the family photograph may be.
DOMESTIC BLISS gives one of those possible experiences a form and leaves the viewer to decide how unfamiliar it really looks.
