I’m sitting on the carpet of my grandparents’ living room. I just came from a run and I don’t want to get dirt on the sofa – it had been raining and my clothes are muddy. I tell grandma about some work-related news that had made me sad. I tell her about my feelings, not just the story. “I’m quite sad about this”, I say. She switches the subject and tells me about something she read in the newspaper, a story she had already told me the previous week. Grandpa asks if it had been raining. I tell him yes.
Grandma says to grandpa that I’m being more physically active than he is, which makes sense, considering he’s 57 years older than me.
She also says that she hopes she won’t live for much longer. “Nobody should get this old.”
I wonder if she means it.
I wonder if she’s scared of dying.
I share my news in my (nuclear) family chat. My mom has a couple of questions, which I don’t know the answers to. She says that it’s a pity and that she and my dad are about to leave for a hike with the dog. My dad never texts.
My brother tells my parents to have fun.
I wonder if I will turn into my parents when I get older.
Will I too one day hope to be dead soon, like my grandmother?
Will I (still) be able to hold space for other people’s feelings?
Will I continue to be able to talk – or at the very least write – about hard feelings?
Growing up, I never understood how people could turn their back on family. Being a family meant having to put up with each other, the genetics being the indestructible bond. Family over everything.
This makes sense especially if based on the premise that children owe their parents.
But what if the children are unable to form a meaningful relationship with their parents once they grow into self-sufficient adults? What if they have nothing in common with their parents once they no longer live under the same roof? What if the communication is one-sided?
In my experience, it’s very easy for a family to fall back into old, unhealthy patterns, no matter how much time has passed or how much each person has worked individually on getting past their childhood experiences. I can manage with some distance, short(-ish) visits and giving myself permission to remove myself from the situation, whenever the unhealthy patterns are in full swing – permission to not engage, so to speak.
Does this make me a bad person?
Sometimes I feel guilty about it, especially when I’m being reminded of my absence. Family members like to tell me that it’s been nice that I finally visited again, and that it’s been a while since they last saw me – as if it was solely my responsibility.
Does it make me sad?
On occasion, yes. Whenever I watch a movie or TV show depicting healthy family dynamics – family members authentically cheering each other on and genuinely caring about each other’s feelings, for instance -, I cry.
It isn’t a secret that I don’t engage with that many people outside of the mandatory social interactions. I like to spend a lot of my free time alone, and with people whose presence I enjoy. As I’ve explained in previous posts, I can’t afford to fill my free time and weekends with too many social calls, as this prevents me from recharging adequately for the week ahead. This has been a difficult thing to admit, even to myself, and I’m aware that it can make me seem difficult.
Just last week, I had scheduled so many social events (and by “events”, I mean a series of one-on-one interactions) that I had to take a day off work to be able to recharge properly.
All this to say that family visits aren’t a priority very often, being what they are.
If our family members weren’t our family members, but just people we happened to cross paths with – would we choose to spend time with them?
Carrot Days 