Beyond the Mandatory Milestone: Redefining Family
I am 31 this year, and the word “family” feels less like a noun and more like a complicated, confusing map of a territory I am not sure I wish to inhabit.
As a Javanese woman, the external script is already written for me: an engagement, a ceremony, a husband, and children. It is the static architecture we were taught to draw in elementary school, a house with a triangular roof, a father, a mother, and two children standing hand in hand in front of it under the sun. It is a destination I am expected to reach by my third decade. But as I observe the world, I see that the “family” we are told to build and the “family” we actually inhabit are often entirely different stories.
The Silent Growth
I am lucky to be surrounded by friends who dared to make this decision relatively quickly. I have been watching them with an intense curiosity. The babies seem to change face in days, grow taller in months, they access their cognitive and kinetic abilities rapidly, adding words to their vocabulary and white teeth that seem to grow vividly in weeks. Their clothes grow tight only weeks after being bought, that is solid, visible growth. But when I see my friends, they are the ones who grow the most, and they do so in silence.
I can write an entirely different script about them now. Not because they have become different people, but because they are reenacting life on a different radar, discovering versions of themselves they never knew existed. It’s exhilarating and partly liberating to see them become someone they never knew they could be, testing themselves through strengths and patience, and succeeding. Yet, if I am honest, there is also a terrestrial loneliness there, a sense of being lost in the very script they chose to write. It is not pity with which I look at them. It is awe at how creating a family allows them to manifest more than they knew they could. I am more than happy to witness their pleasant, rather bumpy journey.
Cinema as the Silent Articulation
Recently I finished watching Sentimental Value by Joachim Trier. The way it was written, oh god, how effortlessly they carry deep emotional value to the surface. The guilt of the absent father, the resentment of the abandoned daughter, the understanding woven into the script at the end, oh it felt like an emotional relief for me as an anxious audience member. We were given the chance to look at both sides, something intensely hard to do in reality where we navigate emotions individually.
It is unavoidable that we expect others to fulfill their moral obligations as they should. But when they are not capable of delivering their duty, we resent them. Or we resent ourselves when we are not capable of blaming them entirely, because we partly understand the intensity of carrying our own duty. To look at a person as a wounded human being deserving compassion and love beyond their failed duty as a father, or a daughter, or anyone, that is the harder task.
We are taught that family is a home, where comfort lives and sanctuary resides. I can see that in my friends’ architecture. But we know life is fragile, and we have seen how quickly that sanctuary shifts into a chaotic arena. For many, it can be a place of “deafening silence” or “fiery storm.” In reality, growing up and listening to stories, seeing how people make ways around each other in a unit called family, it often felt like a cosmic practical joke, putting souls who feel like strangers, or even enemies, under one roof.
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In this version of family, you don’t walk, you navigate. You calculate every move to avoid the “landmines” of buried resentment or unspoken tension. Instead of comfort, you burn yourself dry in exhaustion to perform the role of good “daughter”, “son”, ” mother” or “father”. I find myself yearning for a connection that exists beyond these roles. What if doing your moral duty within the familial role is not the entire task? What if allowing them to grow, navigating ourselves around how they have fulfilled their moral obligations regardless of what others deserve, is also part of it?
The Capital of Kinship
But then there is the cynical side of the bond. I recently sat through an exhibition at the Cemeti Institute that reframed the famous Indonesian nostalgia: “Harta yang Paling Berharga adalah Keluarga” (The most valuable treasure is family) coined by Keluarga Cemara created by Arswendo Atmowiloto. Almost every Indonesian will know that phrase, but the question is: is it still relatable? And in what context?
The exhibition pointed out that family is often a capital tool, a way to legalize access to power and opportunity, revealing the nepotism has long operated in the shadows of the wayang figures of father, mother, uncle, aunt, daughter, and son. It showed a picture of a young man opening a keranda fragment, the dead walking again, as if the nepotism of the Orde Baru era walked among us once more, feeling more real than ever. Walking through the exhibition I was reminded by those two Nobel Prize winners who said that your income today will determine the income of your children in the future, they were right.
In all honesty, there are times I look at the capital power in people and consider what “class” they can bring to me and my family. It is maddening and exhausting, because to see them that way means that I have to be more conscious of where I am standing myself, in my own capital capacity and class. I feel I would have to give in entirely, body and soul, to match that. Meanwhile, the other person only needs to carry a card and a title to the table, I have to bring out everything I can. How can I want to be seen as class instead of a soul? Checking the exhibition again, the title felt incomplete without adding “yang Berharta” (those with wealth). It makes me wonder: is the family I am being pressured to build just another cog in a social and financial machine? If so, I refuse. I will not give my body and soul just to match a capital requirement.
The Man on the Supra
The other day, I watched a father at Taman Baca in Wirobrajan with his two daughters in matching blue cartoon sets. He wore his motorcycle jacket the whole hour, never sitting down, staying close as they climbed and slid. They ran with frantic enthusiasm, and the father, with a noticeably calm yet firm voice, told them to be careful. I read my book while listening to their laughs, seeing them peek at me from the corner of my eye.
I smiled when they started chattering about bringing their mother next time. Their father said, “Yes, ask her yourself. Invite her. What will you say to her?” They were blabbering endlessly and bet on whether she would eventually come. The older one end up negotiated for a gift if she succeeded. The father was silent for a moment before promising a book. The elder daughter sighed loudly, entirely disappointed, and the father said that a book is a wondrous thing. I wondered if he said that because of me there, reading.
As they left, I watched him prep his Supra. He had a small rattan chair tied between the handlebar and his seat, carefully strapping the youngest into a washed brown jarik cloth before the older one climbed on the back. “Be careful,” “Do this,” “Learn this.” The scene I witnessed that afternoon was a study in immense, mundane care, expressed through a steady, relentless hum of instructions. And I realized, no matter how lovely it was to watch them, I do not want a family where life is reduced to a series of mundane directions. I do not want to be a ‘function’ of someone else’s expectations.
Standing in Wirobrajan
Still standing in the Taman Baca in Wirobrajan, I recalled my conversation with Mas Nanto, who always kindly shares his walking tours experiences around Jogja, Magelang, and Solo. He said that Wirobrajan is a village where one of the Keraton brigades resides. Back then, the Sultan wanted his abdi dalem to live nearby, and the surrounding villages were divided based on their specific roles. Where I reside used to be owned by the Wirabraja, a red-uniformed brigade who fought the VOC, named for wira (bravery) and braja (sharp senses).
Am I brave and sharp enough to navigate through what a family can be beyond moral obligations? As a unit that grows together, I want to be seen simply as a human being, as honest and raw as possible, rather than a function of someone else’s expectations. If family is a set of moral obligations, a tactical minefield, or a tool for capital, then my answer remains a “no.” But if there is a version of family that allows us to drop the “roles”, the daughter, the wife, the provider, and simply witness each other’s dynamic humanity, that is a different question entirely.
Before I can decide if I want to be a wife or a mother, I have to decide if I am willing to write a new script, one where ‘home’ isn’t a place where you tiptoe, but a place where you finally stand still. To do this, I must practice my wira and braja here in Wirobrajan, where I have decided to reside.
