All in the Family

Whenever I think about family I always imagine pushing my hands deep into warm mud and pulling the roots up to the surface for inspection.

As a rule I never write about my family, but family does come up, primarily because it impacts us. It is so influential that it’s never a topic that can be avoided for long. In the next few weeks I go home for my niece’s christening and family, as such comes to mind once again. I went home recently for a vacation and it was the first time in a while that I spent more then 3 days with my family all in one sitting. Usually I can only take a few days at a time, and its not because they are terrible people, its not because I hate them, its because our dynamic usually only works for a few days at a time and then it becomes too much. For us I think it becomes too much because there is to much that has always remained unsaid within our family. We just aren’t emotionally expressive people and when you pair that with the things we’ve gone through it just makes us more inclined to try and ignore our feelings but less inclined to be able to do so.

Anway. I think family is tough for everyone though- I mean after all, your family members are the ones that have known you the longest and while they ultimately have perceptions of you that can be left over from times of skinned knees and self- absorbed childhood, they do see those small bits of our personalities that have been there since day one and that usually go unnoticed by others unless they look very closely. Maybe in a way that’s what keeps some of us tied to our family. Although they may never understand us intimately, they know us intimately and maybe sometimes it can be comforting to know that someone out there knows about how we developed into who we are- they were present and witnessed it for us.

This, I think, is the reason I believe your family is not just made up of those related to you. Sure, inevitably- unless your circumstances dictated otherwise- your family members bore witness to your development, but I think if anyone cares enough and pays close enough attention they can begin to know us at a different level as well. And then there are those life experiences that you share with others that push you into development together and inevitably create a situation where that other person then begins to know you intimately, even if they don’t understand you. This makes family too I think.

Creation of family throughout life for me has become important. Not the creation of a family-as in having kids or getting married- but the creation of family. Making an effort to bear witness to what others need someone to witness, accepting and understanding things as part of the eternal development we all go through, and likewise inviting people into my life that can do that same for me.

So in a few weeks, when I go back home for this christening, even though I disagree with the religion and even though I may never understand my brothers drive to christen his daughter, or my niece’s future perceptions of religion-whatever they end up being-I will have bore witness to this part of her development, this part of her creation and I can say that I know her and that she is my family. And in a way, as stilted as the interactions can sometimes get amongst family, it’s a comfort – at least to me- to continue the tradition of bearing witness and building family.