After recently witnessing, experiencing, or hearing about several incomplete, unloving, and/or alienating family gatherings and situations, and being uninvited to another, I have decided that,in the interests of maintaining the limited and questionable quality of family relationships that I presently have, I will get a dog, and instead focus all of my attention on it for the next few years. My next book will be written about my adventures in training a dog, which will probably gather a lot more interest than the process of training my own mind, which was documented in the first one. I have never been one to “quit while I am behind”, yet it remains an attractive temptation. “Staying the course” must give way to”staying on course”, though.
Holidays with family can be a truly humbling experience. I have written a 500+ page book about “penetrating the conspiracy of silence”, yet the best posture that I can give to many groups of people, and certain individuals within those groups, is detached love, or unintentional indifference, especially when talking about trivial matters unrelated to the historical “elephant in the living room”, which everybody strategically avoids discussing.. By myself, I am absolutely powerless to stop an emotionally unhealthy momentum that continues to gain strength through the family network sharing a similar accumulated history, especially among those whose shame, guilt, judgements, mental illness, and/or addictions remains such an oppressive force. It is especially difficult for me to find an entry point into the life of another who, for whatever reasons, I have failed to previously connect with. It can be like trying to jump onto a merry-go-round that is spinning faster and faster. It appears to me that when the passive or oblivious part of me predominates, the “conspiracy of silence” has its highest potency.
The eternal challenge and the potential for heartbreak and conflict in human relationships is between the perceptions of:
1). what the connections once might have meant to everybody involved,
2). how those connections are being experienced now, and
3). what the connections might potentially become, if a healing change appears to be in order.
There are rarely new moments in long term family relationships, but instead we continue to carry over the “leftovers” from past family dinners and experiences. Many times the accumulated history of family relationships can be characterized as if they were a series of melodramatic vignettes, only to be interrupted by periods of a fragile or uncertain peace, or truce, between the disruptions and eruptions.
An all-too prominent communication style can become
1). Don’t feel
2). Don’t trust
3). Don’t Talk
4). Don’t heal
My Uncle Wayne has always been a part of my life, since I can remember. And, in fact, his face is one of my very first memories. He has three beautiful children, who I grew up with through my youth and young adulthood. Yet, right now, there is conflict between the children that I can now only witness, and feel sadness and heartbreak over. I have several cousins from my father’s side of the family equation who don’t even know who I am, let alone will not even invite me into their homes. I have a cousin, Wendy Myers, who I only recently met within the last fifteen years. She came into our family by way of her own research of a wayward grandmother’s teenage birth of a child over ninety-five years ago, who was adopted out, and who begat Wendy. Wendy continues to show more interest in family connections than those cousins who I share a prolonged history with through both my aunt Susie and my deceased Uncle Ed. Aunt Susie’s second daughter, Cindy, looks away from me even now when she sees me at the athletic club that we share membership at. I must carry quite the scary face.
I have two step children who make zero effort to connect with me, and one of them probably hopes that “white American middle-class male despair syndrome” causes me fatal illness.. I have three grandchildren, two of which have little or no need for my presence at this point in their life (or at any previous point). I was once a grandchild to two very loving grandparents, and I treasured my relationship with them. I am disappointed that I could not be the vehicle for the transmission of that same love to my own grandchildren, as I received from my grandparents. I have no children of my own, and had I become a father, I would at least have been able to force a measure of my relevance upon those few captive family members. Now that I am retired, and my grandparents and parents are dead, I have little relevance to the rest of my world, save my wife, sister, a few treasured friends, an uncle (my mother’s brother), two cousins, and an aunt (my father’s sister).
Some families and groups, and certain hurt and damaged people within them, just want to watch their world, and other members of their own family, burn. And, some watch helplessly as the family burns, and turns to ashes. And some write books in their own attempts to understand the foundations for chaos within and the collapse of the human family structure. I know that somehow I have co-created this entire family drama, yet I am not sure that my complicity was either conscious or intentional. My “sins” may be either of commission, or omission.
The idea of forgiveness, like the idea of Christmas and Jesus Christ, is worshiped as a great idea, yet it all too often fails to find enough willing and vulnerable people to embody itself within.,
I could care less as to what Jesus would do.
I do care about what we are prepared to do
I once heard from a hurting man in a recovery meeting that he would rather people hate him, than be indifferent to him. At least, he gets to experience an exchange of energy with the haters. I think that compassion and empathy might be the best option here, but not enough people carry these healing balms in their spiritual tool kits.
Love, hate, or indifference, we are all free to choose again.
“Just saying”.
Right now, the new puppy idea seems to have the greatest potential for success in the short term..
