Family Matters (Virtual Coffee {10})

Family has been on my mind a lot lately.

I did a google search on “immediate family” right before I started writing cause I wasn’t sure if it included just my husband and children or also my parents and siblings and I was astonished to find out that immediate family includes my husband, children, grand children, parents and siblings (whole, half or step – of which I now seem to have at least one per category) as well as my in laws (mother, father, brother, sister as well as possible future son and daughter); I guess I was just being narrow minded when I thought immediate was actually, well, immediate.

It puts a whole extra layer of thought and consequence to the whole “you’re not just marrying the man, but his whole family too” concept. Although, bizarrely, first degree relatives are just spouse, children, parents and siblings, I would’ve thought aunts, uncles and cousins would’ve fit right in there.

Anyway, I’ve been giving family a lot of thought. My family is all over the place. I rarely see my mother and brother as they’re in the US (lucky bastards!), my grandma’s in Brazil, my half-siblings are all in Italy but nowhere near us, so I practically never see them, this makes me feel a little isolated sometimes as well as a possibly over-protective of my little family unit (husband and kids).

I know, this is starting to read a bit like a demented census, brother, sister, husband, children blah, blah, blah…

On the other hand, I seem to be constantly surrounded by the husband’s family. They’re all over the place too, and yet they always just seem to be here. It’s a little twilight zone-ish. I’m not complaining or anything, I get along with my whole extended (or should I say immediate?) in-law family and I’m happy to be quite close to most of them but we’re, well, different.  Of course, most of the time different is good, it helps define boundaries and roles but other times it’s just hard and tiring and exasperating to have to wrap my mind around another family dynamic.

Each family has it’s own dynamic; it’s own very specific and very personal patterns of interaction. It’s like a dance, where each member knows his own complicated steps and it usually comes together harmoniously, or discordantly, but it makes its own particular kind of sense.

Family matters are a bit tense right now, nothing major, and certainly nothing regarding the husband or I (or our children), but it makes for a lot of drama. Mostly unwanted drama on our part, as we’re really trying to concentrate on the husband’s recovery and not things that really are no concern of ours. And yet… and yet… we always seem to get sucked in, despite our best intentions, and it’s unsettling and it’s unhealthy I find. I’m not going to talk about it, it’s not my business to share, plus right now I’m more interested in the whole philosophical aspect that in the actual reality of it all.

There’s a lot less drama on my side of the family, there are also many more miles. Does physical distance play a role in our involvement, or is it the ever-elusive family dynamic that differs? And how, does one change it were one to want to (and I want to)?

Ideally, I would like to crank up the interest, the closeness and the intimacy with my side of the family, just as I would proportionally tone down the theatrics, recriminations, side-takings and phone calls on the other side of the family. Is a happy medium possible or would it require too drastic a change in the family dynamic? A change that inevitably would call for too many adjustments on the part of individuals who, more than likely, are happy, or used to, or set in their ways and unwilling and uninterested in changing, because, after all, why would they want to change if I’m the only one perceiving a problem. Because that’s the thing about family dynamics, they are set in place and perpetrated by individuals in a family and that’s what works for them, even if it doesn’t seem to work or even if it doesn’t fully work for all family members.

So the husband and I find ourselves in a strange limbo, we truly come from different worlds, with different experiences, with different, ingrained dynamics that don’t completely fit us anymore and we have to find a way, a path, that works for us, for our family (and here I’m only included the husband, children and myself). We have to create and perpetrate our own family dynamic, one that works for us and that ideally takes the good from the examples we were given and removes the bad.

I know, I’ve been rambling on forever and really this is much more of a discussion for whiskey than coffee, but you see, I’ve been thinking a lot about family lately and all this writing, all these words, really help me work out the jumbled stuff in my head. It’s important to me to do this, it’s important to hear your opinions, it’s important to talk about this, though no real answers are (or indeed can be) forthcoming, because at the end of the day family matters doesn’t it?


Now, go say hi to our hostess Amy who's totally "in the Spring of things"!

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