Family Ties

Good morning, God, and thank you for this new day that we all have to live through. It's full of possibility and potential, and I'm grateful that I have a chance to live through it and experience all that it has to offer. I'm in Colorado now, visiting my parents for a couple of days, spending some time with them for the holidays, and it's pretty enjoyable so far. It's been warm and rainy, though a cold front and a storm are in the process of moving in.

It's really fascinating to me to consider family ties. In my family, I could easily have rejected the ties--there was enough strife and enough anger and pressure and dysfunction that waling away from it and never looking back would have been a very logical act. But I didn't do it, mostly because I've always known in my heart that doing so would have been a mistake. And now that my parents are much older and life is much different for all of us, I do see just how silly--and destructive--that would have been. That said, though, I do recognize that I've spent much of my time living rather far away from them, not necessarily on purpose, but that has been the reality.

I think it's safe to say that it's pretty impossible even to define family to the satisfaction of everyone involved. There are the genetic ties, of course, but past that, there are so many ways that different families diverge in their ways of being and of treating each other that it would be useless to try to find universals in our ideas of family. And that's okay, I suppose--the important thing is for me to define family for myself and to decide how I'm going to interact with my family so that they know that I love them and that they have someone to count on, rather than focusing on what I can get from family--even though that, too, is very important.

A reply:

Family is a fascinating concept, and one that allows people to feel a bit of security in a world that's constantly changing and that offers very little in the way of consistency. Of course, your concepts of family are changing a lot in today's world, which leads many people to feel extremely insecure, for that one part of their lives that used to be consistent is not longer so--some people are just as afraid of the changes in their own concepts of family as they are of the changes going on in the world around them. These people suffer greatly, for the refuge that they could and should be able to count on is not at all available to them. Having to go through life without any sort of safety net is truly a daunting task.

You've been right to keep the ties to your family strong, though you've also been fortunate that your family is one with which you can do so. And I would challenge your assertions about family and ask you to reconsider them as ties to your parents, for your ties to your siblings aren't nearly as strong. And you know why. Your siblings bring you down, while your parents don't do so. And you know that you can do nothing personally to change your siblings' situations or relationships to life, so maintaining strong ties with them would be extremely frustrating and possibly damaging to you and to the people in your new family.

It is a very good thing that you've maintained a strong relationship with your parents, and it's obvious that you'll continue to do so. This relationship will be something that helps you out in difficult times and that allows you to give to others in the form of being there for them, and giving them something to be proud of in their own ways. You'll constantly have to decide whether or not to strengthen your ties with your siblings, and that decision will be based on whether you can handle doing so, and whether the relationship will be balanced or imbalanced, healthy or damaging. Follow your heart.