on the fammo

My life be like… the fear of never falling in love and the tears after losing the feelings of what you thought love was, like the dirt still up under the rug.  My life be like…  bad characteristics covered in Christ’s blood.  The joy of new birth and the pain of growing up.  The bliss between giving my all and giving up.     
Grits “My Life Be Like”

Family relationships are amazing things.  Family is devotion and mutual respect.  Family is unquestioning love.  Family is honesty.  Family is being real even when it hurts.  Family is speaking truth in love.  Families seek to make each other better, more complete people.  Families help you in your endeavors, even if they do not think it’s the wisest decision.  Families work hard for the good of the whole, sometimes for the good of one… one other.  Families hurt each other badly.  Families leave scars that will never heal.  But they seek to grow past and from those scars.  

My family experience is not so unlike most other Americans my age.  It was both better and worse than a lot of others’ experiences.  I know that things could have been MUCH worse.  Both of my parents are still living, and under the same roof.  I was never sexually abused.  I was never physically, mentally, or emotionally abused.  Because I received (and often it was earned) the raw side of my parents’ anger, I have some emotional scarrage.  Because my parents never had a healthy relationship, I have some relationship issues.  Not only do I carry my parents’ genes, I also carry their mistakes, and their parents’ mistakes.  I carry with me not only the baggage of their mistakes, but also am left with voids they could not fill because of their handicaps.

One of those voids, as I mentioned earlier is my problem with knowing how to heal relationships.  But I sure do know how to deal with family stuff.  When I moved back home after two years away at school, my mom and I discovered a lot of issues we had with each other.  We would spend hours some nights yelling and crying and talking and blowing our noses and hugging.  This irritated the far (that’s southern for ‘fire’ kiddos) out of my dad.  He’d lay into us.  We fight all the time, we don’t know when to quit.  Oh bozhe, don’t get between me and a good argument.  When I’m fired up about something and you step in…  You put your finger in this cage and you’re liable to get it ripped right off.   I don’t know where I was going with that.

I guess at some point I learned that I have these crazy strong opinions and if I don’t get them off my chest, I’ll explode.  In high school, I was terribly mean with these opinions.  Looking back, I did not understand that just because a thing is true does not mean it needs to be said.  When I moved away to college, I went to the other extreme.  I made myself become ambivalent.  At some point after I moved back home, I developed my own voice.  I trained myself to speak truth in love.  I’m still pretty crummy at it.  But it came with practice and hard work.  I have some members of my family that I cannot do this with because the basic trust is not established.  I have some friends who have become members of my spiritual family to whom I feel obligated to speak truth.  

Family relationships are for encouragement.  But these family relationships have their own Mazlow’s hierarchy.  The foundation is trust.  Trust is earned.  After trust comes respect.  After respect, love.  I believe that love requires truth.  So with those requirements, this means encouragement is not simply saying, “You can do anything you set your mind to!”  It’s saying, “If you really want to be a lawyer, I’ll help you, but you are going to have to work a lot harder than you are now.”  It’s saying, “I know you love baseball, but you need to be realistic.”  It’s saying, “I love you, but what you are doing is destructive behavior.”  It’s being tough.    

If you are a member of my ‘family’ you can expect some things from me.  I will not let you treat me with disrespect.  I will not tolerate your treatment of others with disrespect.  I will not let you walk all over me.  I will not tolerate being tooled over.  I will fight for you at all costs.  I will empty my soul so that you might thrive.  I will not tolerate your being disrespected, or tooled over.  I will expect you to be as honest and loyal to me as I am to you.  We will hurt each others’ feelings.  We will fight to heal that relationship, even if it means crying, laughing, snotting, yelling, and rejoicing.  I will expect you to be honest with yourself, because if you cannot do that much you cannot be honest with me, and how could I trust you?  I will not accept falseness and I will neither ignore nor let you ignore something which should be dealt with.  You will have to understand my human failings and fragileness.  I will fail you and you will break me.  And vice versa.  I will expect all of the above from you.  But family loves each other through that right?  You can decide…  Is it worth being a part of my family?  

I thank God for the random members of my ‘family’ strewn about the world.  The beautiful thing about family is this:  you can be absent for months, even years, and the love and trust has not diminished.  To my family, I pray you have a merry Christmas!