Connections
My little brother just had a baby girl. And, outside the awesomeness of that fact, it's bringing up all these issues around family and connections. Actually, they've been making themselves felt for a while now. I chose to go live with my brother and sister-in-law for a couple months after their wedding, before coming down to Arizona. And it rather sharply highlighted some serious deficiencies in how my family handles connections.
My mom was worried I was getting too attached to my brother and his family. She thought it might not be so healthy to spend a couple months living there, that it would make me... what, I'm not sure. There are aspects of that which are not wrong. I have a tendency to over-care, to provide too much to the detriment of the person on the other ends ability to be independent and responsible. That is absolutely true, and has been true for much of my life. With my brother and his wife, though, it was more about falling into a needed family connection. They gave me more than I gave them, in the form of stability and love. I NEEDED that, and I was willing to go out of my way to get it. I made sure it stayed healthy on all our parts, made sure I didn't interfere in their relationship, made sure to give as much as I took. But it was so good for me, and I'm grateful I was able to do it.
If I had listened to my mom, I don't know what I would have done, but it wouldn't have been as healthy.
Her aversion to my course of action, though, taught me something about my abilities (or lack thereof) to ask for things. We separated ourselves so sharply, our family, from everyone else around us. My mom and dad both have very strong social connections with their peers, though mostly very shallow. But not with their extended family. And they encouraged their children to maintain the same distance. Because it was too much work, I think, too scary or overwhelming to deal with their extended familys drama. I don't really know, I'm just hypothesizing about that. Much of the undercurrents that seethe below the surface of my family are well beyond my ability to truly understand. I'm too close to it. It's like looking at a wave as it crests over you. All you see is a wall of water, not an ocean.
But I do see the effects of that distance. It makes it easy to walk away, from even the strongest of connections. For all of us. The threat of disfellowshiping, of being excommunicated from family, is not an idle threat. It's an everyday looming reality. But for the grace of some tenuous lies and fragile ability to ignore reality, our family would be split apart. I don't know what the reality of that would look like. I doubt they would actually refuse to talk to us. But the comfort and love of family would be overwhelmed by the need to change, the absolute need to bring us back to their way of life and thinking. For now, it's possible to tread the surface of those dark waters. But the knowledge that they could reach up and swallow us all at any time... it's potent. I know I talk about this a lot. But my comfort with and growing closeness to this other side of family is really highlighting the long term, overwhelmingly negative aspects of it.
I crave connection. CRAVE it. I create it, at cost to myself, in some really unhealthy places. But I also create it in beautiful places. And those beautiful places make me mourn my inability to create it where I want it most. They make me realize that I overshare, that I throw myself out there into the consciousness of the world on purpose. I can't imagine being willing to hide anything anymore, and want to be seen and acknowledged. I would rather the world knew too much, though I still hide what I feel is unacceptable.
And I am still incapable of asking for what I need from the connections I create. Because that's too much to ask. It's too heavy a tether to put on another human being, to ask for what I need from them. And I'm realizing I feel that way because of the fragility of the connections of my youth. Every tether I threw out there was either rejected or resented. There's a lot of info out there about how being the child of an alcoholic affects you for the rest of your life. Being the child of a rage-aholic seems to have similar consequences. You learn from a very young age not to ask for too much. NEVER ask for your needs to be met at the expense of their needs. Never assume your emotions are more important than theirs. Never assume it is not your job to keep them happy and calm. Because if you don't do it, who will? And the repercussions of not doing it are pretty intense. They tend to stick with you. For life.
And they tend to make you want to recreate those scenarios, so you can get it right this time. That's a known facet of the human brain, how we learn, that need to recreate scenarios over and over till we get them right. What we haven't acknowledged is our inability to get other humans right. It feels like we haven't evolved enough yet to deal with some of this shit.
My mom was worried I was getting too attached to my brother and his family. She thought it might not be so healthy to spend a couple months living there, that it would make me... what, I'm not sure. There are aspects of that which are not wrong. I have a tendency to over-care, to provide too much to the detriment of the person on the other ends ability to be independent and responsible. That is absolutely true, and has been true for much of my life. With my brother and his wife, though, it was more about falling into a needed family connection. They gave me more than I gave them, in the form of stability and love. I NEEDED that, and I was willing to go out of my way to get it. I made sure it stayed healthy on all our parts, made sure I didn't interfere in their relationship, made sure to give as much as I took. But it was so good for me, and I'm grateful I was able to do it.
If I had listened to my mom, I don't know what I would have done, but it wouldn't have been as healthy.
Her aversion to my course of action, though, taught me something about my abilities (or lack thereof) to ask for things. We separated ourselves so sharply, our family, from everyone else around us. My mom and dad both have very strong social connections with their peers, though mostly very shallow. But not with their extended family. And they encouraged their children to maintain the same distance. Because it was too much work, I think, too scary or overwhelming to deal with their extended familys drama. I don't really know, I'm just hypothesizing about that. Much of the undercurrents that seethe below the surface of my family are well beyond my ability to truly understand. I'm too close to it. It's like looking at a wave as it crests over you. All you see is a wall of water, not an ocean.
But I do see the effects of that distance. It makes it easy to walk away, from even the strongest of connections. For all of us. The threat of disfellowshiping, of being excommunicated from family, is not an idle threat. It's an everyday looming reality. But for the grace of some tenuous lies and fragile ability to ignore reality, our family would be split apart. I don't know what the reality of that would look like. I doubt they would actually refuse to talk to us. But the comfort and love of family would be overwhelmed by the need to change, the absolute need to bring us back to their way of life and thinking. For now, it's possible to tread the surface of those dark waters. But the knowledge that they could reach up and swallow us all at any time... it's potent. I know I talk about this a lot. But my comfort with and growing closeness to this other side of family is really highlighting the long term, overwhelmingly negative aspects of it.
I crave connection. CRAVE it. I create it, at cost to myself, in some really unhealthy places. But I also create it in beautiful places. And those beautiful places make me mourn my inability to create it where I want it most. They make me realize that I overshare, that I throw myself out there into the consciousness of the world on purpose. I can't imagine being willing to hide anything anymore, and want to be seen and acknowledged. I would rather the world knew too much, though I still hide what I feel is unacceptable.
And I am still incapable of asking for what I need from the connections I create. Because that's too much to ask. It's too heavy a tether to put on another human being, to ask for what I need from them. And I'm realizing I feel that way because of the fragility of the connections of my youth. Every tether I threw out there was either rejected or resented. There's a lot of info out there about how being the child of an alcoholic affects you for the rest of your life. Being the child of a rage-aholic seems to have similar consequences. You learn from a very young age not to ask for too much. NEVER ask for your needs to be met at the expense of their needs. Never assume your emotions are more important than theirs. Never assume it is not your job to keep them happy and calm. Because if you don't do it, who will? And the repercussions of not doing it are pretty intense. They tend to stick with you. For life.
And they tend to make you want to recreate those scenarios, so you can get it right this time. That's a known facet of the human brain, how we learn, that need to recreate scenarios over and over till we get them right. What we haven't acknowledged is our inability to get other humans right. It feels like we haven't evolved enough yet to deal with some of this shit.
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