Variations on Family

Jukebox Woman has written a touching and, for me, provocative, essay on family.  Her experiences have differed so much from my own that she has given me a lot to ponder.

Reflecting on a recent visit to her family of origin, from which she now lives at a distance, she says, "Being with my family lets me breathe with ease.  It's like sitting on a beach with the breeze from the ocean filling my soul with hope.  It's like finding that important treasure you thought you'd lost forever...but only getting to hold onto it for a short time, before losing it again for a while."  

I have concluded that I am incapable of even imagining such a response to the family from whence I came, although I recognize the feelings.  They are the same ones that I had for many years about the family that my husband and I created, and that I hope will emerge again from the shards of the shattering upheavals of our children's adolescent years.  

I lost my mother at the age of seven.  As Hope Edelman writes in her book Motherless Daughters, most women who have been through such an experience look back at that event as the beginning of the end of their first family.  It would be a gross generalization, but one with some universal truth, to acknowledge that a family dependent upon a father for maintenance of the emotional glue needed to hold it together crumbles quickly, and the subsequent appearance of a stepmother on the horizon sweeps what's left of those crumbs into a dark and forgotten corner.    

I suppose I mark "being on my own" from the date I left for boarding school at the age of twelve.  Although the school was only 20 minutes from my house and most of the girls who lived that close were, in fact, day students, I seldom went home more than once a month.  Three years later I was in a new school, 800 miles away, and after that went home only two or three times a year.  I went to college just as far from home and, although my husband and I eventually returned to my home state for graduate school and careers, geographical proximity does not create or sustain a family connection.  

Most of my friends live far from family. In fact, that's probably a big reason for our close friendships -- we are accustomed to functioning in the absence of extended family, but we want and need a community on which to rely.  Among my friends and acquaintances, many parents and, this year, two husbands, have died. Three of my closest friends have lost both parents in the last several years.  Our children are beginning to spread across the map.  We are well practiced in forming deep connections beyond the bonds of family, and are trying to nurture family attachments that cross longitude and latitude.  

I don't think that it ever occurred to me that anyone beyond my husband and me would be responsible for our children.  That sounds unfair as I write it -- we have been the beneficiaries of great financial generosity and, a few years ago, when our family was plunged into crisis, my father and his then-new wife moved in with us for three weeks and managed everything that I could not.  But as far as day-to-day life is concerned -- it just never entered my head that my family would have much to do with it.  I've been sorry when they haven't been much interested in the lives of my husband, my children, or me, and I've felt envious of other mothers whom I've seen shopping for their children or planning family events with their own mothers, but I never felt particularly lonely or burdened by my responsibilities.  

However, I can see, through Jukebox Woman's writing, how my life might have been quite different, and I do envy her the sense of her own family as sustenance. Perhaps it's just a matter of not missing what you never knew in the first place.  I can't say that I've spent much time wishing I had a mother -- I barely remember mine, so life  without a mother is what I know.  And I've never lived near family as an adult, so that's not something I long for either.  I have, however, been surrounded by close female friends since I first moved into a dorm with a group of them when I was twelve, and I'm not sure I could get along without relationships like that.  And my own children -- well, my need for them is another story altogether.  But I'm getting accustomed to not requiring their geographic presence.  And, although they are at those ages between adolesence and adulthood now where it seems wise to make no predictions whatsoever, I hope that their own sense of our family is strong enough for them to cling to it as a treasure, even if they have to stretch their arms across continents and oceans to do so.