Family

"Family" is one of those love 'em - hate 'em kinds of topics. Consider these quotes about family:

"When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them." (George Bernard Shaw)

"The family - that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to." (Dodie Smith)

"The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together." (Erma Bombeck)

And then, this one: "Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation." (Margaret Mead, 1963)

Most folks I know have rather strong opinions about families. Some of them are overwhelmingly positive, and, frankly, some of them are pretty darn negative. If you were raised in an Erma Bombeck kind of family, I congratulate you. Many of us, however, were raised in homes like those Margaret Mead described - the impossible situation of the isolated nuclear family. "Outside interference" from relatives and friends was rebuffed. Like all Good Americans, we were independent, do-it-yourself types, self-reliant and responsible only for and to ourselves. The nuclear family was made up of Dad, Mom, 2.5 children, dog and/or cat, and a station wagon. "Unusual families" might include a lone grandmother.

There are of course good reasons for rebuffing interference, such as when it truly is interference, when family members are asked to sacrifice themselves in the interest of maintaining unhealthy family systems or to prop up a dysfunctional or addicted family member. Many a person from every generation - teenagers, young adults, wives, husbands, grandparents - has had to walk away from a toxic family situation in order to become healthy. This seems to have happened so often in my lifetime in real life as well as in books and movies that even a "nuclear family" becomes unusual.

Some of us think of this as normal. And that gives me great pause. This is a tragedy. A whole generation of us have not learned how to be together as families and still be individuals, still be healthy, be connected but not fused or enmeshed or otherwise dominated by our families. Those of us who were raised to believe that aunts and uncles and grandparents were to be fought off grew up to feel that parents and brothers and sisters were to be fought off and then husbands and wives and children were to be resisted so that they wouldn't take us over.

But this is a false dichotomy. How about this quote from Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founding editors of Ms. Magazine: "If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct." It isn't either/or - either be in a family or be alone. One can be an individual and still part of a group. We need to be able to recognize that we are all interdependent (not simply dependent, nor independent) - not only with our unchosen "nuclear families" but also with our extended families and also those whom we choose to have as family - our church families, our neighbors, our friends. And that interdependence is how we were created, by a Trinitarian God, God in relationship. This is how we are in the image of God, as interdependent creatures bonded together in love and mutual respect, bound up in an earthly existence and so responsible to one another. We live in mutuality with the Earth and all its creatures, and our communities, and yes, even our pesky little siblings and our sometimes ditzy spouses and our "there s/he goes again" parents and our children who give us such delight and such pain. And if we would let our families large and small, chosen and unchosen, uphold us, we might feel like this:

"What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories." (George Eliot)