Family
Truths
“My
family—any family—is a collection of hard and complicated
truths.”
Betsy
Cornwell (A True Story; Parabola, Winter 2017, p.105)
We all want our personal
lives to be seamless. We post happy pictures on Facebook, along with
little human interest stories, or smiling snapshots of us in exotic
places. Looking at them, people have the impression that all is well
and everyone is so, so happy. But all families have steep hills to
climb and irritants in personality. It helps to know that whatever
circumstances your family faces have been faced by millions of
others. We humans have a number of common scenarios that we confront
as we travel along life's bumpy road. If we're older, we can look
back and see that good times were often followed by hard times, and
that somehow, we resolved our differences and moved on. We can
disagree with family on every circumstance and still be deeply
connected by blood and bone. Life is not seamless, so why would we
expect our family life to be?
I don't think that life
is amiss when we're being challenged. I think that life is supposed
to be exactly as it is. Whatever is happening right now, is life, and
whatever happens next week, even if it's the opposite of what's
happening right now, is also life. Our job is to navigate the
shallows and the depths, and figure out, in any given situation, what
is the best response in the moment. It's not easy. Sometimes life
gives us bitter gall, and sometimes red-velvet cake. Sometimes our
families are difficult to understand. We wonder where they came from;
how can they be so different from us when we were all raised the same
way. It's good to remember that we are born with our own set of
strengths and weaknesses, and we gather our history as we go. That
history involves struggle, triumph, and defeat, and each of them
leaves its mark. Each influences our next encounter. We all come into
adulthood with scars, some more visible than others.
It's good to hold on to
the good times, and to know that they are the juicy part of having
deep connections and unbreakable bonds. It's also good to be fully
present in the not-so-good times so that whatever lessons they carry
will not be missed. We're coming into the season when most of us will
be encountering family, both those with whom we feel compatible, and
those who are a fly in our ointment. If we can look at them as part
of our story—characters who provide a broad display of human
behaviors to enrich that story—we may be better able to manage. We
might give thanks for the ones we get along with, but also, for the
ones who rub us the wrong way—they are our teachers. They introduce us to our own “hard and complicated truths.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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