Families: A New Year’s MMP
Happy 2007, everyone! And to ring in the new year, as I often do on New Year’s Eve, I’ve been reflecting a lot on life and stuff. This year, I just recently had that nice visited my mom and sister and had some great talks with my sister for the first time in too many years (we’ve stayed in touch but not talked regularly for over 20 years now) as well as some good talks with my mom on the phone since I got home (since she turned 80 or so, I’ve been calling her every Saturday morning – it’s something I feel obligated to do no matter where I am). And I’ve become aware of and mystified by the fact that even though my family is small, it’s surprisingly close – for no discernible reason that I can figure out.
My immediate family is pretty small, just parents and me and my sister, and we’re just two years apart in age. We fought nonstop growing up, of course, as siblings do, but I guess it just never occurred to us that we wouldn’t always stick together. We frequently united against our dad – which wasn’t hard, he was not a particularly good parent, was angry a lot at us, was prone to punishing us for things we hadn’t even done, and generally didn’t do a whole lot to help us be happy people. Both she and I have both spent much of our adult lives separating ourselves from the rest of the family, quite deliberately, but for some reason the separation has never taken.
Now my sister has got all kinds of permanent, chronic, and debilitating medical issues going on, and her life has changed so much that it’s hard to watch her, living on disability, struggling just to manage ordinary things, and unable to enjoy almost any of her former activities. What I’ve found so interesting, though, is how in spite of our many family conflicts and separations over the years, everyone has just automatically circled the wagons to work together to help my sister out, no matter how unlikely that reaction might seem based on our family history. She’s getting help from our mom, Papa Tigs and I, her son – everyone is just stepping up to do whatever needs to be done to make sure she’s as okay as possible, and the accidental teamwork is quite startling.
So this has led me to pondering deep thoughts recently. For example, what is it that keeps some families close and others split apart? Ours doesn’t look like the kind of family that would stick together, and yet somewhere along the line, circumstances have brought us close together again, even though we’ve spent so long apart. I’ve pretty much decided that the best explanation for our family’s behavior is that we operate on the tradition that it’s more fun to make each other crazy up close and personal than far away, so no matter how obnoxious anyone is, we never actually deliberately lose contact. Which I realize doesn’t exactly make sense, but I’ve certainly never been able to come up with anything better! And we certainly do make each other crazy…but when someone needs something, everyone jumps right in to help.
And so, even though they make me nuts on a regular basis, I’ve finally realized that I actually am grateful for my family. I hear so many other peoples’ horror stories about their families, and I see so many other families that are so dysfunctional and tear each other apart over the smallest things. But I’ve finally figured out that my family, no matter how annoying and obnoxious it may be, is still not really all that bad in the grand scheme of things.
So I do believe it’s a happy new year for me! I hope everyone wakes up this morning with no hangover, and has a very happy 2007!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
It’s still raining, and the plans for today are minimal. I expect to be up to my elbows in clay eventually. And so begins 2007…