What We're Made Of - A Family Day Reflection

circa 1986

 

Dear Family Before This,

We don't know it yet, but we are strong.*

This happy family snuggle on the little green couch in the front room of our semi is from a time before all the things.  And if I could I wouldn't go back to tell us what was coming.  I wouldn't interrupt the story of us, the building of us, the making-strong of us, as it happened.  It's tempting.  But I'd leave it alone.  Because today we are strong in ways remarkable.

Like every parent I do wish I could go back and undo some blunders; those exhausted responses lacking patience, and lacking my own maturity of self back when I thought that how we all behaved was an open commentary on my mothering, my personhood.  So much seemed at stake, and I'm sorry I laid all that weight on you all.  Parenting is such an ironic endeavour.  It's such a delicate and dangerous thing, yet only amateurs attempt it.

So, yes, there are those things I'd love to do over now, equipped with the wisdom of my 60's.  But not the things over which we had no control and yet seemed so out of control and wretched and painful and undignified and also so incredibly defining.  All the things.  All the things we've lived and received and faced and stood up for.  All the things that shaped us and refined us and created this entity that is now our family.  I wouldn't go back to stop them.  Except Evelyn.  

But even because of Evelyn, along the way we have become something truly spectacular.  Strong.  So strong.  And I am so incredibly proud of us.  Humbled by the lessons, humbled by the frailty, humbled by the demolishing of dogma and narrow-mindedness, humbled by the now-knowing that it's truly not possible to get it right and be proud of that.  No.  But proud of us.

We are strong.  

For all the things that have come against us, we should not be together.  But we are.  For the hugely different ways we think about life and believe about life and live life, we should not be a unit of family.  For all the forces seeking to destroy us, we should lay in ashes.  But instead we stood up and stood together and stood strong.  For all our losses there have been out-balanced gains in measures still to be unwrapped and reveled in.

Here I bear witness to the grace of God who has never let go.  Never.  Else how could we be?

And in a mystic sort of way, I write this to us all.  All of us who have been received into this family between this picture and now.  You are already on the couch with us as I write this today.  You are part of our together-strength, part of the flawed-but-tenacious love that holds us together.

I am not the same person pictured here.  The capacity of my heart has been expanded in unrecognizable ways because of you.  Thank you for loving me, all the imperfect things of me.  Thank you for being family in all the deep ways humans belong together.

And if I could line up all the families in the world....

With gratitude too deep to speak,

Always....Your Wife, Your Mom, Your Gramma

*Sometimes when I've used this word I get criticized for being stoic.  That's not what's happening here at all.  "Strong" includes the strength to be weak, to cry, to be real, to need others, to admit defeat and then start again.  Believe me, that's how it's gone down.