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Over the weekend, I attended my brother's wedding in Wisconsin. This was a momentous occasion for several reasons, first of which being that my brother was getting married, second being that I was traveling to the land of cheese after having only weeks previous finally given up all dairy (KHAAAAAAAAN!), and third being that it was the first time my entire immediate family could be found in one location in about eleven years.
The thing is, when you've hardly seen someone in eleven years, the only frame of reference they have for relating to you and your life is the you of eleven years ago. They will treat you like you're still the teenager you were when you left home, and in your weakest moments around them, you will become that person again, and you will hate yourself for it.
But the point is, you aren't the same person. If you're doing things right, then it's fair to say you've changed, you've grown, maybe you're hardly recognizable as the same person you were last year, much less a decade ago. And it's difficult to go through all of that, all of the struggle and torment and the painful chrysalis that is involved in trying to become a better, fuller, more complete person, only to have the people who are supposed to love you the most come along and turn the clock back on you, as if you'd never won any of those hard-fought battles.
I don't say this to imply that being around my family is a torture, though maybe it sounds that way. In fact, seeing my brother in what you might consider his now-native habitat was a joy. In almost every picture I've ever seen of him, my brother has a kind of painfully restrained smile on his face... like he's dying to grin but admitting it would be a weakness, or maybe he's just embarrassed to the focus of someone's attention. He's always seemed to me to be rather uptight. (Hilariously, this is apparently how he described the rest of his to his wife before she met us.) I didn't quite expect the brother I met when I arrived for the wedding.
He was sort of strangely loose-limbed. And he smiled sometimes without clamping his lips tight like he was afraid some sound of mirth might escape. He was affectionate and easy with the kids in his new family. (In this, my brother clearly has me outpaced.) He was... happy.
I loved my new sister-in-law instantly and intensely, even before I actually met her. It was obvious to me that she'd helped my brother become who he was now, and that she'd loved him because of the person he'd already been becoming, all those years while in his family's heads time had perhaps stood still.
Because that coin turns both ways: much as I chafed under my family's unwitting expectation that I would remain always the same person, I realized I had done much the same to them, recognizing perhaps the small changes but not understanding what new creatures they had become while I wasn't looking.
Though I am told that they do exist in reality, the kind of loving, Monopoly-playing, tight-knit Brady Bunch family that you see in the movies is completely outside the scope of my experience. My family didn't argue or fight (we just had cold wars and armistice agreements), and there's no particular bad blood or trauma that's divided us all these years, just a sort of apathy, and a lack of cultivation that lets relationships wither through neglect.
I've always been a firm believer in the idea that people can choose their own families. They can choose to sever ties with people they don't want in their lives, and they can choose to build bonds with other people they meet along the way. I've done it with a particular fervor since flying the nest, and forged closer relationships with people who were once strangers than I've had with my own family. Those people and the things they've taught me deserve much of the credit for the much more happy, well-adjusted, more emotionally grounded person I am today. I have loved my family, but from a comfortable distance.
The older I get -- and, I like to think, wiser -- the more I realize that we can choose, too, those relationships we've let weaken. We can make that conscious decision to revive the ties that we had neglected and to bring into our self-made families the newer, better, stronger, happier versions of the people whose love we may once have let slip away. We're all building our own families all the time, and in choosing who we will name among them, we must choose those same relationships again and again, in a constant litany of affirmation. People change, and relationships don't remain the same. We can choose to love, or not love, to be passing indifferent or passionately fervent, to nurture ties or let them die. We can let go of the ideas we have about who people are or were, and we can let in the people they've become. We can choose to become better than who we've been.
We can introduce our new selves to the people our loved ones have become, and get that pick-up game of Monopoly started.
The thing is, when you've hardly seen someone in eleven years, the only frame of reference they have for relating to you and your life is the you of eleven years ago. They will treat you like you're still the teenager you were when you left home, and in your weakest moments around them, you will become that person again, and you will hate yourself for it.
But the point is, you aren't the same person. If you're doing things right, then it's fair to say you've changed, you've grown, maybe you're hardly recognizable as the same person you were last year, much less a decade ago. And it's difficult to go through all of that, all of the struggle and torment and the painful chrysalis that is involved in trying to become a better, fuller, more complete person, only to have the people who are supposed to love you the most come along and turn the clock back on you, as if you'd never won any of those hard-fought battles.
I don't say this to imply that being around my family is a torture, though maybe it sounds that way. In fact, seeing my brother in what you might consider his now-native habitat was a joy. In almost every picture I've ever seen of him, my brother has a kind of painfully restrained smile on his face... like he's dying to grin but admitting it would be a weakness, or maybe he's just embarrassed to the focus of someone's attention. He's always seemed to me to be rather uptight. (Hilariously, this is apparently how he described the rest of his to his wife before she met us.) I didn't quite expect the brother I met when I arrived for the wedding.
He was sort of strangely loose-limbed. And he smiled sometimes without clamping his lips tight like he was afraid some sound of mirth might escape. He was affectionate and easy with the kids in his new family. (In this, my brother clearly has me outpaced.) He was... happy.
I loved my new sister-in-law instantly and intensely, even before I actually met her. It was obvious to me that she'd helped my brother become who he was now, and that she'd loved him because of the person he'd already been becoming, all those years while in his family's heads time had perhaps stood still.
Because that coin turns both ways: much as I chafed under my family's unwitting expectation that I would remain always the same person, I realized I had done much the same to them, recognizing perhaps the small changes but not understanding what new creatures they had become while I wasn't looking.
Though I am told that they do exist in reality, the kind of loving, Monopoly-playing, tight-knit Brady Bunch family that you see in the movies is completely outside the scope of my experience. My family didn't argue or fight (we just had cold wars and armistice agreements), and there's no particular bad blood or trauma that's divided us all these years, just a sort of apathy, and a lack of cultivation that lets relationships wither through neglect.
I've always been a firm believer in the idea that people can choose their own families. They can choose to sever ties with people they don't want in their lives, and they can choose to build bonds with other people they meet along the way. I've done it with a particular fervor since flying the nest, and forged closer relationships with people who were once strangers than I've had with my own family. Those people and the things they've taught me deserve much of the credit for the much more happy, well-adjusted, more emotionally grounded person I am today. I have loved my family, but from a comfortable distance.
The older I get -- and, I like to think, wiser -- the more I realize that we can choose, too, those relationships we've let weaken. We can make that conscious decision to revive the ties that we had neglected and to bring into our self-made families the newer, better, stronger, happier versions of the people whose love we may once have let slip away. We're all building our own families all the time, and in choosing who we will name among them, we must choose those same relationships again and again, in a constant litany of affirmation. People change, and relationships don't remain the same. We can choose to love, or not love, to be passing indifferent or passionately fervent, to nurture ties or let them die. We can let go of the ideas we have about who people are or were, and we can let in the people they've become. We can choose to become better than who we've been.
We can introduce our new selves to the people our loved ones have become, and get that pick-up game of Monopoly started.