The House We Grew Up In

Individually, each member of the family has blamed themselves for Rhys’s death and has found their own way of dealing with it. For Lorelei, it is by gathering objects around her. Her hoarding is taking over her life, leaving little room for anything or anyone else. She becomes aggressive when confronted about it, as shown in her increased violence and bad language. When Maddy asks to move into Rhys’s room, Lorelei calls her “a thoughtless little shit” (193). She sees the request as a violation of her house and memories. Vicky tries to reason with her; she and her daughters are being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces, and she notes that it’s inevitable that Maddy and Sophie “will come into contact with your things. When there are so very many of your things for them to come into contact with” (190). It is not the actual objects that are important—Lorelei doesn’t know the names of the paperbacks Vicky took to the school fair and has no intention of reading them. It is more that they are missing parts of her life. The dialogue and imagery in these chapters show how Lorelei’s coping mechanism backfires; rather than protecting her, it isolates her from everyone she loves.

Vicky hints at this when Lorelei tells her to “butt out,” remarking, “[O]ne day you might just get what you want, and I truly believe you wouldn’t really want it” (191). While Vicky has been part of the family for a long time, this is still a moment of outside perspective, highlighting the worth of Clarity Gained from Different Viewpoints. The Bird children’s cycle of isolation and escape repeats with Vicky’s kids as they grow up; Maddy enjoyed playing with the fun and carefree Lorelei, but she is disillusioned with her hoarding and attitude. In an inversion of the natural order, it is up to the children to set boundaries, and Vicky notes that “Maddy, her baby, her little woman-in-the-making, so composed, so sure of her feelings, put up a restraining hand, as if to say, ‘Stop. This far and no further’” (195). This bolsters the idea from previous chapters that the younger generation can interrupt trauma cycles and start the path toward healing.

While Lorelei still has moderate social interactions, her world is shrinking, as is her body. Along with losing her children’s bedrooms to her hoarding—symbolic of her emotional estrangement from them—she is beginning to lose her own living spaces. She survives on a limited diet because she cannot use her kitchen, and she does not wash herself properly either. While Meg tends to blame her mother for her own state, Jewell asserts that mental health conditions cannot improve without treatment, just like physical illnesses. This is made most explicit in Lorelei dying from tuberculosis caused by her poor living conditions. Both of these conditions are treatable with proper care, but Lorelei was isolated and afraid of change. In Meg and Molly’s relationship, Jewell provides a model for supportive family structures and healing, a counterpoint to Lorelei’s tragic circumstances.

Nevertheless, there are reminders of Lorelei’s maternal qualities; Meg remembers how when she made them hot chocolate, “they would go to bed, contented, not feeling that there was one more thing that could be wrung from the day to expand their sense of gratification” (260). With this, Jewell humanizes Lorelei’s condition, showing how she’s still the same person underneath her trauma response. Ironically, Meg is the only child left in England despite being the first one to escape the family home. Now that Beth has left, Meg must manage her mother. She clears the kitchen because her mother is scared of her, which impresses Vicky who is more concerned with Lorelei liking her. Vicky’s tendency toward people pleasing is another of the book’s unhealthy coping mechanisms, a tactic that leads to momentary peace but does not address root issues. As such, Jewell asserts that the healing process is often painful and uncomfortable, but the results are worth it. When Vicky leaves, Lorelei is happy at first because she no longer needs to deal with the discomfort of outside intervention: “Her mother was happy because she finally had the house to herself. She was in control. The master of her peculiar castle […] Just Lorelei and her house. At last” (261). The 2011 entries show that this happiness was temporary, reinforcing the idea that without genuine healing, it’s impossible to move forward.

After Vicky is diagnosed with cancer, Easter is not spent at the Bird home because Lorelei’s kitchen is unusable. Maddy and Sophie cook lamb tagine with couscous and roasted vegetables, but Lorelei only picks at it; this is not “her” Easter, which has been forfeited. Combined with her isolation, the loss of Lorelei’s rituals highlights the way her coping mechanisms ultimately fail her. The theme of Family Ties and the Cyclical Nature of Trauma is brought up when Lorelei asks Meg, “What happened to us. We used to be such a tight-knit little bunch.” (288). There is a moment when Meg thinks they have reached a breakthrough and her mother will open up about Rhys’s death and her hoarding disorder, but once again, Lorelei deceives herself, saying it’s marvelous that she coped with Rhys’s death by barely grieving. The call ends when Maddy and Sophie bring in the Easter cake, and Lorelei retreats into the superficial by exclaiming over it.

Meg has adopted her mother’s hostess role in her own home; although their characters are foils for each other, this shared role highlights how Meg’s coping mechanisms have similar roots to Lorelei’s. She serves roasted lamb and vegetables with red wine gravy to her family, friends, and Bill’s relatives. Despite her new traditions, she can’t forget her childhood Easters and Rhys’s death. She makes a promise to her unborn son that “This boy would never miss an Easter lunch, unnoticed, unremarked upon” (287). Lorelei’s children all blame themselves for his death to some degree, but at the same time, they see their mother as being the most at fault for being too self-absorbed to look after him.

Taking up the theme of Escape Versus Coming Together, Rory is the first of Lorelei’s children to go abroad, and he tries to replicate his lost twin by copying Owen’s appearance. His life stopped in some sense when his brother died, and although he tries, he can’t move on. He doesn’t know what he wants out of life and has no ambition, and when Kayleigh becomes pregnant, he is unable to take on the responsibilities of fatherhood, thinking “I still feel like I’m sixteen” (238). This quote shows that Rory is experiencing arrested development, like his mother. When his father visits him in Thailand, he wants to retreat to his childhood. He “wanted to go home […] he wanted it to be Easter Sunday and for them all to be there, him and his sisters and his brother, saving the foils, holding back on the roast potatoes, being a tribe” (238). The emphasis on saving the foils here highlights his guilt, a feeling that following Lorelei’s rituals might have changed the outcome. Here, Jewell examines the way maladaptive behaviors are not illogical as many claim but are rooted in real attempts to alleviate trauma. Rory retreats into childhood by making Owen both his brother and father figure, relying on Owen to tell him what to do. Like his family members, this coping mechanism fails; his new role model betrays him. Rory accepts his punishment because he, too, has betrayed Kayleigh and Tia. More than this, though, he feels guilt over how he treated his brother. His escape from the family was only physical; he has not escaped his trauma, and this leads to his imprisonment.

Beth is similarly lost. Instead of Rory’s bohemian lifestyle, she is looking for a more conventional life with a good job, partner, and house. However, because of her upbringing, she has no idea what a “normal” life looks like. Like her siblings, she searches for purpose but is drawn back to the past. Arriving in Australia, everything she brought with her smelled of mold, so she threw it all out and bought things locally, ironically from junk shops. Her new flat is “the physical manifestation of her own reinvention” (262-63), creating a parallel between her and Meg. She takes a different tack, though, and buys other people’s family heirlooms and mementos from second-hand shops to create what she calls “a stage set” (262-63). This is also true of her appearance. She attempts to reinvent herself by having a “signature scent, signature side parting with a single diamante clip, signature Mary-Janes in zingy colors, signature pinky-red lipstick” (291), but this look feels like a costume to her. Similar to all of her family members, she tries to persuade herself that she is happy with her life, but she is not coping well. She blames her mother, but Colin argues that “we both played our own parts in our pitiful existences” (263)—here, the novel cautions against using people with mental health issues as scapegoats.

Colin, who has been almost invisible in the book up to now, becomes more of a presence as he leaves England to visit Rory in Thailand, then Beth in Australia, and finally settling with Kayleigh and Tia in Spain. Like his children, escape is a first step toward freedom. He is full of life after “finally finding [himself] at the ripe old age of fifty-nine” (262). His appearance changes from a typical, middle-aged Englishman to one who is deeply tanned and tattooed. He got his first tattoo to mark his new life, and it says in Thai “My children are the stars that light the sky.” This tattoo hints that Colin, like his family members, needs to pursue healing beyond this initial escape. He clings to his children despite having been an absent father, and he expresses his devotion in a language he doesn’t speak; he is trying to change by adopting external pictures of happiness, represented most literally when he starts a relationship with his son’s ex-girlfriend. While Colin has taken his first steps toward freedom and self-actualization, he avoids the hard work of healing like the rest of his family.