Sunday Scribblings: Family

I’ve decided to start up Sunday Scribbling again. Good practice. It’ll flesh out my blog. I might not make it every time, but hey, it never hurts to try. The prompt this week is Family. What does the word family bring up for you?

Not a good question to ask me, because if you’re asking about the word as it pertains to most of my relatives that are not in my nuclear family, the answer is “my lunch.” Harsh, but honest. I could go into details, but there’s this thing called “family loyalty.”

I have large amounts of this, possibly too large. I never talk about the things that have gone seriously wrong in my family to outsiders. I sometimes don’t talk about some of the things that have gone wrong even with people in my family, out of respect for the cohesion of the family unit. Why break people’s trust with old wrongs when everyone’s fairly happy as is? I keep a close lid on problems in my immediate family.

It’s mostly the same with my extended family, only this is out of respect for my parents. The people in question are their brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces, so it seems discourteous to my parents to spread around dirty laundry about their siblings while they’re still living. Except that I will brush the snow off the tip of the iceberg and say that women are very well suited to be mathematicians, Uncle, thank you very much, and how dare you tell your daughter that she’s only good for making more children to bring into the church?

However, I don’t have problems boasting about my immediate family, and I don’t have problems talking about my dead relatives. I decided that since I boast about my family on a regular basis, today I’ll tell you about the dead relatives instead. I have three relatives that have died, a shockingly small number when you consider that my mum comes from a family of four and my dad from a family of six, and each of their married siblings (which number includes all but one) has a minimum of two children, usually three or four, and one aunt has seven. So to tell you about my dead relatives, which is not the same thing as my dead family.

There was my cousin, Sean. He died in a car accident when he was sixteen, some years ago. I only met him once before then, and I was a young child. I don’t have a very good memory of him. This is what I remember: He smiled, and I thought he looked kind. I also remember I was too young to go to the funeral. I would have been happy to consider him family, I think.

There was my grandfather, Orville. He died some years ago as well. He was the most awesome grandfather ever, even though biologically speaking he wasn’t my grandfather. He was the second husband of my mother’s mother, and he loved her so obviously that… well, it was kind of painful to see the disparity in the levels of affection. He was one of those marvellous people that you always remember for the rest of your life. I have nothing but the best to say of him. I remember that he never raised hand or voice to anyone, he always listened when I talked to him and took me seriously, he always knew how to make things better, and he knew how to make zillions of interesting things like Möbius strips and cooty catchers. I wrote letters to him when he moved and I drew pictures of the animals from Bambi for him and he always wrote back and said what he particularly liked about the drawings. I could keep on in this vein for pages and pages and not finish singing his praises. He was the best grandpa ever. He was family.

And then there was the other grandfather, whose name I don’t remember and whose face I have forgotten. That bastard died not so many years ago, and good riddance to him. I moderate my language out of courtesy to those reading this, and suffice it to say there was no worth in him, no good thing about him, and that if I had my way, he would not have died the relatively peaceful way that he did. Even though he didn’t actually stop breathing all that many years ago, he was dead to me long before that; specifically, when he fled the state right ahead of the police. And no, the crime wasn’t anything to do with me, but it was to do with those close to me, and it cannot be forgiven, not if I were Jesus himself. Especially not when I keep finding out about more and more ways that he blackened this earth with his presence in recent years, all just as horrible as that. This man, though related to me, was never family. I will not have him called that.

I realise I haven’t fully answered the question in the prompt (I’ve just told you about some of my family, brought up by the question), but then, I will never be able to. The word family brings up too many things to ever be properly explained. Family is security. Family is trust. Family is pride. Family is pain. Family is joy, success, value. I could tell you many things that family is not, as well, but principally, blood relation is not equivalent to family. You are not born with your family, you choose your family. It might take many years before you realise it, and people often choose their blood relations as family, but everyone chooses their family.

You choose what the word means for you. It’s not a given.