Family
Sculpting
“A
family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring
impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground.”
Pat Conroy
I'm sitting on my porch
this morning, watching squirrels chase one another in the trees. At
one point, four of them ran out a branch all the way to its end and
then tucked underneath and ran back to the trunk on the underside.
They clatter around the tree trunk, round and round, and squabble
with one another. I'm glad I don't know what they're saying. It's too
early in the morning for such talk. They remind me for all the world
of the human families I know.
I grew up in a pretty
small family. I had just two sisters, one older and one younger. My
older sister was smart and pretty, but she had spina bifida, and
walked with a slight limp. My younger sister had a cerebral
hemorrhage at the age of three weeks, and was severely brain damaged.
I fell in the middle, and other than having asthma as a baby, and
spending most of my first two years in a convent hospital in
Asheville, NC, I managed to get by without birth defects or brain
damage. All of these mishaps, as you might imagine, affected my
family greatly. My older sister and I managed to do the normal
things—go to school, dance at the prom, graduate, go to college,
get married, have children—but our family was not one that anyone
on earth would call typical. Even so, we somehow developed the same
characteristics as most families—we loved one another, but we were
competitive, combative, and given to harsh judgments. We shuffled
around for top position on every hierarchy of comparison, tried to be
as different from one another as possible, and in general, were a
fractious bunch of folks. We laughed, we cried, we fought like mad
dogs; but, we were glued to one another by bone and cell, and never
abandoned the family.
I suspect in reading that
paragraph, you may have recognized your own family—or perhaps not.
Family is one of the categories for which we have exceptionally high
expectations—so high as to be unrealistic. The fact that we share a
bloodline makes us think we should all be on the same page. That is
rarely so, and in fact, I have almost never seen a family in which
everyone agrees, and is cooperative and supportive of everyone else.
If they're out there, I'd like to know about them. What I think
instead is that we are born into a group of people who will challenge
us, rub us the wrong way, and rub us the right way, until we become
who we are intended to be. They are the grist for our mill; the sand
in our oyster shell. Through them, we define who we are, and who we
are not. Everyday, I have more appreciation for my sisters, both of
whom are now gone, for the influence, indeed the major impact, they had on
my life. I wouldn't be me if they hadn't been them. I wonder about
you—how did your family shape who you are today?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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