This essay is for fun. Not serious.
Throughout Fleabag, we are shown Claire’s commitment and love for her job. It seems to stress her out, but it’s a different kind of stress compared to other stressors in her life such as her (ex) husband, her weird stepson and her insecurities. It’s almost like the “good” kind of stress, one that invigorates you and is more of a challenge rather than something you dread. The stress may be from the expectations she has for herself at work rather than the work itself (but this is also speculation/inferring from the limited time we see her at work.). Besides her work, her other commitment is her family- looking after her family, and caring enough to consider letting go of a promotion (Season 1). She says this when asked why she’s rejecting the promotion:
“You can’t just fuck off on airplanes and leave your weird stepson and broken sister to fend for themselves ok?”.
As the eldest sister with two younger brothers, Claire’s care for her family resonated with me. It is not the kind of love you see in a nuclear “loving” family, where everything is alright and love is very pure and not as “functional”. This love stems from some form of anxiety and the need to protect the people who matter to you, especially with siblings when you know first-hand the kind of parents/family they had to grow up with. Yes, the love that encompasses this fear and protectiveness is “love” nonetheless, but it comes attached with the weight of “duty”. For many of us eldest siblings, love can be love and/or duty.
Throughout your life, you learn how to love and care in the praxis of protecting, and many of us firstborns embody this form of love in a family as the eldest. You feel this gravity, of having your first-born status transmute to the duty of caring, of expectations placed on the first-born; because you are the first, you should be the first to achieve whatever it is you are expected to; because after your parents, you are the eldest, and where your parents might falter, you’re next in line to absorb that responsibility and care for your siblings. This is not a universal experience, but it is one I see in Claire, myself, and many other eldest daughters.
This care and responsibility Claire assumes for her sister (after losing their mother), her stepson, and her marriage, means there is an element of control she needs to possess. If you are left in charge of something, you would want to control it as much as possible so that you do not need to bear any consequences. When you are left to look after a child who is not yours, you find ways to control to avoid the child from doing something that might hurt themselves and leave you responsible for this hurt. This is where the care the eldest child has for a sibling diverges from the care a parent has for their child.
A parent does not need to answer to anyone necessarily when they are left to be responsible for their child. If their child gets hurt under their care, parents only disappoint themselves. The eldest child has to look after their siblings, who are not their children. Anything that happens to the child then leaves the eldest to be questioned by others. The eldest cannot be the only one disappointed with themselves, unlike the parents. The eldest is by default, bound to disappoint someone else (someone in authority or older in their vicinity) if they do not care properly. And so they need to be in control as much as possible, to protect and take care, to avoid disappointing others including themselves. Among many other traits, this arc describes Claire and her relationship with others in the show.
This element of needing to be in control is something I noticed in Marcus from ‘The Bear’ too. When he has to leave his mother temporarily to learn in Finland, he is seen anxiously trying to get reassurance from the carer that everything is and will be okay. He is responsible for his mother, he cares for her and has taken the responsibility of caring for her. He sends her images of his creations and voicemails, sustaining their relationship and by extension, that responsibility and care he has for her. If he loses that, he has disappointed someone. That “someone” is nondescript, and maybe it is him. We are not let into his family circle as much (and much of his life outside the kitchen throughout the show) so who he disappoints besides himself remains unclear to me.
I’m talking about Marcus’s care through this lens of responsibility and duty, but I also want to emphasise that all this caring can be done out of the love one has for a parent as well. This goes back to my earlier point about love being love and/or duty. This form of love one has for a family member can coexist with a sense of responsibility. I love you and within this love, I need to protect you too. If I do not protect you, who is there to love if I lose you?
This coexistence of love and responsibility may be something felt by many eldest children, such as myself, Claire and Marcus. It may also be what parents feel for their children. Except as the eldest child, we did not decide to bring this person (to care for) into our lives, this has been decided by others, our parents/birth givers. They forge these relationships between us and them, us and our siblings, us and our grandparents, and so on. We do not make these relationships in our families, we are born into them and how we wear these relationships depends on a multitude of factors throughout our lives. In the case I’m highlighting here, our relationships with our siblings are not decided by us, but many of us as the eldest (not all!) experience this coexistence of love and responsibility. This inability of Claire and Marcus to decide who they relate to, however, differs from another relationship we see them have — the one with their work.
Their relationship with their work is one they could decide, and so they pursue something they enjoy respectively. This ability to decide what to pursue is not the reality for many, but Claire and Marcus’s ability to decide the route they take in their career and being able to watch their passion is probably why it is so rewarding to see them in their “element”. Through their craft, they get to have spaces to extend care and assume responsibility over something of their own decision (or at least they have more decision power compared to having no control over who they need to care for in their family since their familial relationships are not decided by them).
Maybe this explains why I enjoyed seeing Claire in her element at work, why I enjoyed the Finland episode and felt for Marcus when he got wrapped up in his doughnut-making that got him into trouble. We can see them care and be committed to something they want to.
Again, I should remind that this is not the reality for many, and I am making assumptions based on the limited time we have on them. But it is fun to project! And it helped me make sense of why I was very drawn to them, as I am to many eldest child characters in TV and movies.
As an eldest sibling myself, I love my brothers, and will always care and look out for them. But there is an unspoken understanding, when I see Claire and Marcus, in their spaces of work, that this is something that truly makes them happy and does not carry the emotional burden caring for a family member does. They want to look out for their siblings and parents, just as I do for my own, and they do love who they care for. However, in their work and craft, just as with their family, there is care and responsibility and love. But the difference is that they have tied the string that connects them and their work. They were not made to pursue their craft, but have come to love it on their own, they were not born connected to their work through an umbilical cord.
