I’ve lately found myself contemplating the importance and benefit of family for support and encouragement. Without going into any of the gory details, I’ll admit that my family, such as it was, was less than fully supportive of me, from early childhood on up (although not in the same league as the Sampiro clan), and most members seem to be quite satisfied to have seen the last of me. I’ve never really accounted for that as cause of problems or lack of accomplishments in my life, preferring to assume that this burden is laid completely on my own shoulders, but I’ve recently started to speculate on how much of my current situation and issues is the result of parental neglect and disinterest.
I’ve had the privilege of late to be acquainted with a number of people who are the product and/or a provider to strong families, and have seen what that can produce. My current boss, for instance, is an unqualified great father; very interested in what his college-age children are doing; he’s enthusiastic about their futures, encouraging to their interests, and while they’re not spoiled or pampered, he provides for their education and material support sufficient that they don’t have to struggle or sacrifice their goals in order to get through school, and he does it all without resentment, complaint, or imposing his own perrogatives (above and beyond being successful in their chosen fields) upon them. Indeed, he seems almost shamefully proud that his kids are getting every advantage and opportunity he can afford them, and in return, they all like to see him and do activities (diving, golf, cooking) with him. Ditto for another guy I work with; he flies across the country to Florida 3-4 times a year just to spend a weekend with his son; his kids call him regularly, just to talk to him. This is so foreign to my own experience that I’m just continually astonished; it seems almost wrong that these people are so responsible for their children.
On the other hand, I work with many people who have backgrounds somewhat similar to mine; parents who were resentful, neglectful, or that just outright abandoned them. I suppose it is no surprise that most of these people (myself included) have a lot of emotional baggage to carry around; many are underachievers who could do far better, and have great difficulty with relationships, being motivated to improve themselves, making and living up to commitments, et cetera. Most have irregular or reluctant contact with family (particularly parents) and many don’t seem enthused about starting families of their own, or taking any kind of responsibility for anyone else.
So, what is your experience with your family, and how did that influence or assist you in achieving your goals, getting what you want out of life, developing healthy relationships, et cetera?
I had a mother and grandmother who loved me very much, and were great supporters and encouragers. But all else who are related to me by blood were/are a critical, emotionally destructive, negative bunch who I don’t associate with anymore.
So, no family, and I live alone. (I don’t have pets either, so there’s been no emotional transplantation going on in that line). I don’t regard family as important, in my own case, and really can’t bear being around other families at times like Easter and Christmas. I do get my goals achieved, though.
Kind of a mixed bag, but not too bad. My parents love(d) me and supported me and I never felt deprived or anything, but they weren’t perfect, either. They divorced, there was some alcoholism, etc. I would say that I didn’t lack support or love, but there were a few emotional issues (mostly having to do with them being divorced) that perhaps colored my outlook on relationships. I’m happily married with children, a good job, and everything’s pretty good, overall. Not perfect, but good. I have no real complaints.
I think most people fall somewhere between your boss and you.
I have a great family. My parents are still happily married - this year was their 40th anniversary. We spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents whe I was growing up, and the set that’s still living see much more of us than of their other daughter, my aunt. My dad worked really hard to send my sister and me to college - no perks though; if we wanted to live off campus, we had to do it on the cheap and we had to buy our own cars and luxuries. Taught us a lot about managing money.
We’re all fairly emotionally distant as adults, but that’s what works for us. My sister and I talk on the phone a couple of times a year, and my mom and I maybe once a month or so, but it doesn’t mean that we love each other any less; just that we’re not big phone people.
I’m trying to be the same sort of parent to my children, although I am divorced and only have custody every other week. I don’t talk on the phone to them much on my weeks off, but I am at every single ball game and school function. They will get the same college deal that I got, thanks in part to gifts from both of my grampas.
I don’t know any other way to raise children than how I was raised. I think many people learn that way, although clearly some learn in the negative, i.e. how not to raise children.
I would put my family background somewhere between your’s and Sampiro’s. But the affect of that on me is quite opposite from those you describe of the people with similar backgrounds that you work with.
Knowing I had no one to fall back on if I hit hard times, turned me into an over- achiever. To be able to leave town at 18, I figured I would have to go to college. We didn’t have the money for that, (actually my dad had set aside money for my college, but my mom decided I couldn’t have it) so at 16 I enrolled in beauty college while still in high school so when I graduated I could cut hair and pay for school.
My first real job while in college was working at a franchise hair salon. I was desperate to keep that job, so I was the model employee. The other employees didn’t like that much, and I knew they would eventually want me gone. So I then became the model co-worker as well, taking shifts they didn’t want, covering for them, giving them my extras sales once I hit my quota.
By the time I graduated from college, I had been promoted up the line many times, and was managing the top salons in the region. I was offered a job with the company and travelled the country teaching others to run salons. Again I was promoted up the line, offered jobs from competitors, had people who would invest in me if I wanted to open my own shops.
It wasn’t unusual for me to work 80 hours a week. I was motivated by the need to make sure I would always have a job. Had I had a normal family who would be there if I needed help, I doubt I would have worked so hard.
By the time I was 25, I had a great career, making good money, a “success” in many ways. But I was still a mess when it came to relationships. I was an easy target for guys who were looking for someone to manipulate. I ended up in many bad relationships, giving the guys money, doing their work for them. My friends from work could not understand how someone who was so confident in work situations could be so pathetic when it came to relationships. But I knew.
Growing up, I had no feelings of ever being secure. My drive to do well at work became my security. I knew as long as I was willing to work longer and harder than anyone else, I would have a job.
When I was 28 or so, I really started working on the other parts of my life. From my goal setting success at work, I learned apply that to other areas of my life. I picked one area at a time, and made the improvements I wanted. Eventually the other areas were where I wanted them.
I see many of my friends who had much more supportive families, now struggle to take care of themselves. They never really learned to budget, never learned how to compromise when needed, never really learned how to go about making changes they wanted to make.
So I look at my disadvantaged younger years as being an advantage for me as an adult. I often think I could have ended up in a really bad situation had I not focused on my career first, then learned to deal with the other things.
My rather warped “work ethic” led me to start my own business, and then start a business with my husband. That business has done so well we were both able to retire at relatively young ages, my thirties for me, my husband in his fourties. We now have a wonderful life, and I don’t feel guilty, I know I earned it. I still have that drive that is a part of who I am, but now my time is spent doing fund-raisers and other charity work.
I do share one thing with those of your co workers, I don’t have any desire to have my own family. I am quite sure I would be a horrible mother, either doing what my mother did, or going to the extreme opposite in a desire not to be like her, and then smothering my kids. I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone else, so I am quite content going the childless route.
All of my extended family has been estranged from one another, to some degree, since both sets of grandparents died. Once they had no reason to get together, it stopped. I’ve actually never visited any of my relatives by myself. If I had ever showed up on their doorstep, they’d wonder what I wanted. I’ve got cousins I’ve either never met or haven’t seen since they were in their single digits. Now they’ve married and divorced and have piles of kids I wouldn’t know from Adam. I don’t even know where any of my aunts and uncles or cousins live, and I have no idea if they know what happened to me or where I am. I haven’t seen any of them since my mother died ten years ago, and I don’t expect to see them again. I’ve already lost a couple relatives, and I had to find out third or fourth hand.
My parents should never have got married. Or maybe my mother should have married a different man, because the one she did marry has wrecked our family beyond repair. I was pals with my next youngest brother up until eight years ago when I moved here from Canada. I’ve never met his son, and he’s made it plain that we aren’t having a relationship anymore. My sister, who is eleven years my junior, has never wanted to have a relationship with me. She’s on her third marriage now, and I have no idea what her latest husband’s name is, and I’ve never even seen a picture of her son by the previous one. The only member of my family to attend my wedding was my youngest brother, who came from British Columbia to be here, and we barely knew each other. Now we talk several times weekly on MSN Messenger, and he’s visited when he comes down here to do Disney. He’s the only family I have.
My father was a tyrant. There was no bonding or teaching or guidance, only beatings and accusations and terror. And then the neighbors showed him how to drink, and our lives all went to shit. I had to leave when I was 15 to protect myself. I never spoke to him again, up to his death a few years ago. My brother and sister were the only family members to attend his funeral, out of a sense of guilt, and nobody knew who they were. Shortly after I left, my mother took the kids and left, too. I floundered for about 20 years, just trying to recover from the trauma. So, I have no frame of reference for “warm, loving, supportive family.”
Then my wife came into my life, and I left all that crap behind to come here and start over. It’s been a wonderful time. Her family is about as close to “normal” as I’ve ever seen. Their extended family isn’t in touch all the time, but they don’t actively avoid one another, and there doesn’t seem to be any rancor that I can tell. After what I’ve lived through, I was in need of a large dose of nice. I’ve got that now. As it turns out, I’m the only one in the family who has ever had a stable life and relationship, although it didn’t happen until I was almost 40.
If my family taught me anything, it was what kind of person not to be. The one thing I can’t get past, though, is children. I am terrified at the prospect of being a parent, because I don’t know how, and I don’t have the kind of qualities that would make me a great dad. What if I hated my own kid, the way my father hated me? I mean, what other reason could he possibly have had for the things he did to me? I wasn’t a bad kid. I couldn’t live with myself if I ever saw his behavior in my actions. So we are not having any kids. The family name stops here. As for getting what I want out of life, I didn’t know what it was, only what I didn’t want my life to be like, and in that regard, I’ve succeeded. I’m a pretty happy guy now, and there’s no stress in my life, my wife is great, the marriage is great, the job is great.
Have my experiences colored the kind of person I turned out to be? Certainly. But I don’t have the ‘victim’ mentality. I got my shit together where so many before me have failed. My wife finds me worthy of being her husband. That means more to me than anything,
When I read the book Toxic Parents by Susan Forward, I was not surprised to find every reflection of my parents in the pages of the book. The only section I could skip over was the sexual and physical abuse; toxic parents don’t usually resort to that sort of thing. Just emotional neglect and abuse.
The thing is, until a certain point in time they were great. I think that a certain episode when I was 14 caused my mother to have a breakdown, only no one ever realized because mental illness is so taboo in Indian society. I can’t see how else to explain the complete flip-flop of her personality.
I’ve since gotten over most of it - what can you do? - and am even on semi-friendly terms with my mother. These days what bothers me the most is people who see me as well-adjusted and together, don’t believe how bad it was. They say things like “Oh, well, they took care of you, didn’t they? Did you want for anything? You had toys, and food, and they didn’t beat you.” I don’t understand why the measure for bad things always has to be things worse than you. I realize it could have been way worse, but it was pretty damn bad in its own way. And when you’re in the middle of it it’s hard to see out!
To this day I still feel a little bit of a loss when I look at young women my age who have a great relationship with their mothers. I had two mothers, my biological and my adoptive and yet today have no real mom. I don’t love either of them, and they don’t love me. My biological mom ignored me completely once she had two legitimate sons and who can blame her? After all, I was way more trouble to her than anything else. And my adoptive mom went through most of my life telling me I was merely her “duty”.
Ah well. I’ve had both good and bad effects from this. I have a serious problem trusting parent’s motives. Any parents. It took me a long time to realize my SO’s parents really love him and are not trying to live vicariously through him nor control him.
On the other hand, all this has toughened me up considerably more than I might have been otherwise. I’ve grown a shell, so to speak.
Ah, this is longer then I expected. Apparently I was in the mood to chat.
Perhaps I misstate my case; it’s not that I or the people I refer to are unaccomplished or lazy–most are, after all, degreed engineers or programmers, many with graduate degrees and accolades–but most don’t seem especially satisfied with what they’re doing, and yet continue to stick with the safety of a steady paycheck even though they don’t have dependents or other responsibilities. (It may be, too, that to some extent I’m projecting my own issues upon them to dilute my own sense of failure.) Clinging–beyond reason or need–to security and familiarity seems to be a common factor, and a regular thread of discussion.
In contrast, of my boss’ kids, one is a (successful) artist, another studying to be a dancer, the third still trying to figure out her path but out of the house and (mostly) paying her own keep. All of these kids come home regularly and willingly and generally interact with their parents with an affection that is totally alien to my upbringing. I can’t help but wonder if I’d had something like that kind of support I might have made a go of writing, or stayed in the physics program at university despite my accident, et cetera. Instead, I took the easy route; a degree in Mechanical Engineering (for which I apparently have aptitude but lack a passionate interest) and a couple of abortive, half-hearted attempts at graduate school. And I find it hard, to the point of bringing on anxiety and depression, to consider giving up my current security in order to do something else at which I may not succeed and at which I’ll almost certainly have less stability than I do now.
Same here, alhtough I question my contentedness. I’m not really comfortable with kids, but damned if most kids don’t think I’m some kind of long-lost cool uncle or big teddy bear. When it comes to the “cool stuff”, i.e. activities like camping, diving, science projects, I think I’d be much better than my parents, but I question whether I’d have the commitment and wherewithal to make it through difficult periods, nor would I really be able to provide effective guidence when it comes to dealing with people or coping with the typical challenges of a healthy adolescence.
fishbicycle, thanks for your story. Although I share some parallels with your background, my upbringing wasn’t nearly as horrible as yours; physical abuse was relatively rare, and coming only from women never that injurous. I’d like to think that I don’t bear the self-addressed stigma as The Victim–in fact, I generally took problems to be my fault, and made apologies and excuses for those around me–but I’ve lately come to the ephiphany that had I been recipient of better treatment and some measure of support by those responsible for raising me, I wouldn’t find it such a struggle now to take the initiative to accomplish things I want to do.
I remember back to the times I did, if briefly, get that kind of encouragement; my (step)grandfather, my third grade teacher, my high school composition teacher, et cetera, and the things that I did which seemed so easy to accomplish. Build an analog countdown circuit? Sure. Do a science fair project on residual radiation in tobacco? No problem. Write a story and get it published? Hell, we’ll submit it to these five periodicals and start working on the next one. Now, I often struggle just to do basic life maintanence like pay bills and clean out my study. Applying to graduate school, for instance, seems like a herculean task, even though its just a some bloody forms and a few phone calls to get recommendation letters. Heck, my GRE scores are still good (I think) and they’re certainly no impediment to applying for any program.
In fact, I guess what brings this up is how much more interested I am in doing a good job and how much harder I’m willing to work for the cool new boss than the jerky and oft-absent old boss. (The downside is that I spend less time paging through threads on The Dope, but the upside is that I get paid more, my boss drops by my office to tell me efforts are appreciated, and I feel like I’m doing more than just spinning my cogs to burn up budget. Oh, and I have a better view of the mountains than I would if I were downstairs working for El Guapo.)
I still have a great fear of ending up destitute and unemployable, though, and therefore feeling like I should work as hard as I can, but not buy any luxuries or enjoy myself so that I can pile up as big a financial cushion as possible before the inevitable fall. It’s fiscal responsibility standing in for fears of abandonment and failure. One of my favorite characters is the Neil McCauley (played by Robert DeNiro) in Heat, who lives in this virtually unfurnished condo on the Malibu shore and responds identically to questions about getting furniture or a girlfriend with a terse, “When I get around to it.” Even his screwed up, degenerate gambler and action-junkie crewmates have more of a life than he does. Aside from the ex-con/professional thief/cold-blooded murderer aspect of the character, that’s me. I can’t even buy furniture or bring myself to put a picture on the wall should I have to pick up and move at short notice. There’s something seriously screwed up about that worldview, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of that and figure out what I have to fundamentally change about myself in order to stop living with a refugee mentality.
Anyway, enough random, stream-of-consciousness thoughts about me. Back to your stories.
My parents were mostly loving, encouraging and supportive in my acheiving my life-goals and wanting me to be happy…within reason. My mom’s outlook on sexual relationships, however, didn’t point me in a realistic direction for a healthy marriage. My parents’ relationship was and is almost a fairytale romance that neither one will acknowlege is rare and achingly beautiful.
Premarital sex was out of the question, marriage at a young age expected and encouraged. Divorce was not ideal but perhaps neccessary, but remarriage unthinkable. My sisters and I have repeatedly disappointed my mom in our choices. Fortunately, a good therapist helped me work out the emotional anguish of a failed marriage and a temporary estrangement with my mom and to seek out better patterns for choosing relationships.
My mom, brother, maternal grandparents and I were all a very close-knit family. My father left when we were very young and we rarely heard from him. My mom worked a lot of late hours so we spent most of our time growing up at the grandparents’ house a few blocks away.
After we got a bit older and could stay alone, we still spent a LOT of time over there. Every Sunday we were expected for lunch, and it was an all day affair. We’d be there with our dogs, who visited with their dogs. We had friends that would come by for lunch and bring their dogs too if the weather was nice, and we’d spend a few hours all together out on the back porch watching them play.
There was so much love in that house! My grandfather was a gruff painter who didn’t say much, but we all knew he loved us. My grandmother worked too, but she was a superwoman- kept the house perfect, cooked everything from scratch, was super-involved with church and still had time for those sweet powder-scented hugs. And they loved each other, you could see it, even when they got older and did a lot of sniping and griping. These people were my rock. They’d do anything for us. When my daughter was born I was still young and I left my husband after four months, they never judged me, just supported and took me in. Pawpaw offered to “kick his ass”. Quite funny since my grandfather had just had a quadruple bypass and the early stages of Parkinsons. But I think he’d still have tried; all I had to do was give him the go-ahead.
I didn’t appreciate them like I should, and I know that my love for them has grown as I’ve gotten older and realized just how hard it was for them. They were married at fourteen and had three kids, lived off the land without electricity for years, and managed to give their kids a good life.
And my mom…god, she was an angel. The sweetest most gentle woman. Sometimes she was like a ghost though, so quiet and deep into her books. When I was a teenager she almost died from viral pneumonia. She lived with congestive heart disease after that, but she seemed so okay with it. It was hard for us though, because she kept so much of her illness a secret. We had no idea how sick she was; we just thought she was tired a lot because of her weight.
When my mom died at 49, they were all I had.
When my grandmother passed away a year to the date of my mom’s funeral my grandfather might as well have died with her. He only lived about a year and a half after that, and at the end he just begged us to let him go.
What they did for me was give me an almost unnaturally strong sense of family responsibility and a drive to make my family the same way. And honesty. That’s something else. My grandparents were honest, sometimes bluntly so, but they really instilled the idea that dishonesty isn’t an option. And with the white lie my mom lived for so long, it’s even more important to me to be completely honest and live an honest life.
It’s so hard sometimes though, now. I still have my brother and sometimes I feel like I bug him so I try not to call him so much or push him about needing to get his eyes checked out when I see him squinting. He’s so busy with work and school I’ll go weeks without a call, and he doesn’t know this but the joy of my life is when we all get together for dinner and we sit around on his back porch watching the kids and the dogs.
It’s hard too, knowing my daughter can’t wait to get out of town. She dreams of living across the ocean. It’s not that we’re not close. I’m her best friend and we tell each other everything. She just wants to GO and I don’t really blame her. But I don’t want to lose my little family. Now I have another daughter, just a toddler, and my Miguel. He knows what kind of person I am. I don’t hold anything back, whether it’s affection or anger. I think it overwhelms him sometimes, but he knows that he and the girls are the most important part of my world.
You know, I think I’ve probably written more than what the OP was looking for, and I kinda got off-topic, but it felt good to get it out. Easter is a very hard day for me, especially this one. Mig had to work, my oldest is out of town…it’s been a quiet, lonely kind of day. Thanks Stranger, for bringing up the topic of family and sorry I got so long-winded there.
My family has dwindled until it is basically me, my sister and our mother. My sister has a husband who if the family were a TV show would either get 4th billing or perhaps be heard off-stage or seen in shadow like Maris (Frasier) or Wilson (Picket Fences) because while we’re only about 1% of 1% Creek Indian by ancestry we seem to have inherited all of their notions on matrilineal kinship. I have a brother who if we were a TV show would have guest appearances once or twice a season (and be played by Bill Clinton- they look and sound a lot alike) but no actor would win an Emmy for playing him as he’s not that rich a character. He has kids, but again, they’re in another matrilineage. My sister has pretty much accepted that when/if our mother dies it’s me and her as far as family goes, which is good because making sure that she remains childless and then either living with or outliving her is my retirement plan.
Small as it is and as much as they can drive me nuts my family is extremely important to me. I feel guilty sometimes for not knowing my nephew and niece better (the niece is going to Harvard this summer as a high school program and I’m really interested to see how that turns out- she’s never been away from home before and her father had to have a discussion with the principal and school board of the south Alabama public high school she attends to make sure that the two weeks of class she’ll miss at the beginning of next year won’t affect her chances of graduating or being valedictorian- it would be odd to be forced to repeat 12th grade because you were at Harvard but I could totally see it happening, but I digress).
There’s currently peace in the family (partly because my sister stayed home this weekend rather than coming up to my mother’s house as she’d threatened) so I’m a bit friendlier than I might otherwise be, but there’s a shared heritage factor that is, for better or worse, simply not transferrable. If I met the love of my life tomorrow, somebody I connected with in every way and who I wanted to spend every moment of my free time surgically attached to for the rest of my life, I’d never be able to look at a picture of a monkey in a wagon and say to him “Remember…” and have him answer “Rushmore… peanuts”… “Hair still doesn’t come in there”… “Heh heh heh”- an ALW’s Norma Desmond “We were young together…” musical moment. It’s also cool knowing that if I were to go Schiavo tomorrow due to some contaminated fatback I know my sister and mother would form a human firewall around my hospital bed while a concerned community stood outside and held a candlelight vigil and join legislators and nuns and activists of all ilk who were outside the hospital protesting and posturing and screaming to show sympathy… for the nurses and doctors who were having to deal with my mother sister.
Were I writing this at some other time during the week I might be slinging expletives and saying “ARE THEY EVER GOING TO DIE!” but it’s not how I feel at the moment. My family’s been called dysfunctional (including by family members) though personally I don’t consider them so; dysfunctional to me means failing grade- things like molestation, physical abuse, heroin addiction, etc., and there was none of that. There was a lot of unhappiness but there were good times too and we all have an overdeveloped sense of loyalty and duty to one another and a certain Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc towards common enemies (and any enemy of any member of the family is an enemy of us all regardless of how illogical it is).
My sister will call me to rant and wail about how impossible our mother is and I’ll agree wholeheartedly and sincerely. I also talk to my mother to kvetch about how weird and willfully ignorant on so many things and neurotically stingy or obsessive my sister is and I know for a fact that they go over “what’s wrong with him?” topics about me in seminar style as they plot what I should do with my life. On the other hand when my sister’s husband had a stroke two years ago my mother was the first number she called after the paramedics, and my mother called me and though I had a very important presentation to give I was in a car pointed towards Montgomery within minutes (dog, bag and pistol in the back seat), pulled up at my mother’s house 4 hours away just under three hours later where even though it was “check day at the booby hatch” that my mother managed we were in my mother’s car (dogs, bags and pistols in back seat) pointed towards Mobile (where my brother-in-law was) going 80 fifteen minutes later, and when my mother walked into the ICU waiting room where my sister was standing bright eyed and smiling for various friends and acquaintances and well wishers she took one look at my mother and literally ran into her arms, put her head into my mother’s still ample but sagging bosom and for the first time since she’d found her husband standing up but unresponsive save for grunts and slurring she fell apart. That’s something that’s only genetic, unfortunately, or maybe it’s something about my mother who’s a half-sane and petulant Earth mother demi-goddess but an Earth mother demi-goddess no less.
Of course on the other hand my sister doesn’t know I’m gay. The week she learns that this post would be quite a bit different and would include the words “lucky friggin’ orphans” and “she can go join Grandmother in hell wherever she’s salivating acid on people” and “AAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHH!”. Arguments in my family are relatively few but when they happen they start with a bow, then the light saber comes on and then the 8 ton bits of machinery start flying and it’s basically the last scene of a Shakespeare tragedy only somehow a Dollar General and the phrase “just like that time you were six and you” both become plot points.
But I love them, left a job I liked to be closer to them in case my mother gets sick or my brother-in-law has another stroke or me or my sister needs support, and am glad they were there. If I’m ever much better off financially and can afford constant airfare I wouldn’t mind living a significant distance away from them (see “gay, sister not knowing about- anticipate reaction”) but like Chang & Eng’s ligament it’s a bond that you’ll have until one of you is dead and probably for a few hours after, even when you don’t want it and no matter how much peanut butter you put on it to get the rats to chew through it they never gnaw very far before it’s too painful to stop them. And my mother’s a really good cook.
I am one of “these people”. My parents were never very supportive of me, and have only very begrudgingly accepted any of my interests and ambitions after putting up an enormous fight and countless, unyielding attempts to make me into their conception of what they want me to be. (Whenever I see my dad, he still says, “Are you sure you don’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer?”)
That being said, the description you put forth couldn’t be further from the truth with me. I want nothing more than to be the man to my (future) wife and children that my father never was. This dream is everything to me, and it gives me enormous motivation on a daily basis. And unlike some of my dreams, although I do believe in them, this is one that I absolutely know I can fulfill.
My family is my life. My parents and I have had our disagreements, mainly because they’re pushy but I can’t deny their love for me. They’ve sacrificed a lot for me and my sister and I think overall we haven’t let them down. My sister and I are best friends. They’ve all been incredibly supportive-I don’t think I would have had the opportunities I did in life without them and a large part of my financial/career success has to do with their unwavering belief in me.
Last summer my father was very ill and it was like my heart was breaking every day that I didn’t see him get better…I can’t imagine a life without them.
We’ve been conditioned to expect June and Ward Cleaver…the perfect family, perfect parents, always wise and never any problems of their own. My parents were wonderful when we were growing up. Supportive of our interests, provided a nice home in a good suburban environment, etc. Though they sometimes seemed (to me, at least) a little detached, I realize now that I’m 50 that it wasn’t like that at all. I’m close with my dad (mom died 8 years ago), but not very close with my brother or sister. It’s not like there’s a problem…we just don’t have the close relationship I see with the in-laws or my cousins. I have no idea what happened there, but I wish I was really close with them. We love each other and I’d do anything for either of them. But we never hang out.
I grew up with my mom and dad married, two brothers, and a little sister who came along when I was 13. My dad was starting up his business when we were kids, he drank heavily (and other things) all through my childhood (quit when I was 17). I was afraid of him, but we always had grandparents on both sides and my mom. As I got older my dad and I started to clash, I hated him all through high school and couldn’t wait to leave. He liked to yell and scream a lot, beyond what most people can imagine.
Skip ahead a few years and here we are. My whole family gets together every Sunday for dinner, we only have my grandma left, so it’s mom, dad, two brothers, sis, respective SO’s, and two grandkids. I realize this is a rare thing for a family to be together so much and I’m grateful for it. I can’t imagine not seeing them all the time. We like to be up in each other’s business as much as possible.
My dad backs us up a lot even though he still wants everything done his way. He owns us, but I guess we accept it. Lol. He’s helping me buy a house right now, and I’m really grateful for his help. We all get along pretty well now, but there is still the occasional screaming lecture. Such is life.
I have a fractured family as well. Dead beat dad, good for nothing brother, abusive, crazy mother. I do have a very loving nana who I would love to call “mother” but that upsets her too much.
Because of all this I have a huge desire to start a family and be a great parent. It’s not about re-doing my own childhood but about having something that I’ve never had, and filling a giant void in my life with loving, supportive relationships. I want to give them as much as receive.
I initally felt the same as the OP. I had no desire to start a family and yes my relationships are always fucked up. I feel different now (at the age of 26), so don’t give up hope that you won’t either.
I’ve actually gone so far the other way my BF gets freaked out with how into it I am. He says it’s a good freaked out, though. (:
My parents are both deeply caring yet deeply controlling people. My Dad is one of those larger-than-life personalities while my Mom is more the deceptive steel magnolia type. I’ve found their existence, presence, and support very helpful as an adult once I totally wrote off counting on it and acknowledged their right to have their own priorities for me to encourage or refrain from supporting as they saw fit, and also wrote off any lingering sense that I was entitled to anything from them. Not even to their approval or admiration. Maybe especially not to their approval or admiration, and even more especially to approval or admiration for anything I’d done or accomplished as a consequence of my own priorities and desires rather than theirs.
Absolutely no denying that their love and support was a great boon when I was a kid, but being in orbit around such a pair of strong gravitational sinks as those two did really distort my views of life and world, and breaking free of them emotionally and going my own way (neither defined directly by them nor defined by the attempt to rebel against them) was, umm, kind of interesting. I fear that my sister hasn’t completed the process yet, in fact.
They are admirable people of more than a few awesome accomlishments and capabilities, and good company. On balance, they did a quite good (if not quite excellent) job of parenting, and I’m glad they seem to be enjoying themselves well in the post-parenthood decades of their lives.
If I ever got up to my neck in a jam, they’d be on even the shortest lists of people I’d think of turning to for help even though I’m middle-aged myself.
