Kinship

This year we celebrated Thanksgiving with a family dinner at our home, bringing together family from both sides and various parts of the country.  This morning I woke up reflecting on families and how we think about them.

Most physicians majored in science as undergraduates in college.  I majored in anthropology.  A generalist even then, without even the hint of medical school on the horizon, I was drawn to the study of humans, especially within the social and cultural matrix. This gave me license to also take any courses that interested me, which I happily did, including literature, psychology, sociology, the arts, language, and a variety of student-initiated courses through a pioneering and activist program called the Center for Participant Education (CPE), where I was part of the student staff. 

In anthropology, we studied kinship, drawing elaborate diagrams of personal connection. It was important to understand that in different cultures, the meaning of family is also different, that the mother's brother might have a role in one culture which the father has in another.

I think that I have always perceived all humanity as connected in a vast web, ultimately kin, though the details at the edges vary in ways that can define separation and difference.

My family has its own definitions.  I’m the oldest of three, with a sister 2 years younger and a brother 7 years younger.  My parents divorced when I was young.  My mother Adele’s family was enormous and present in my life.  People traveled across the country to attend weddings, Bar/Bat Mitzvah celebrations, other important life events, and funerals.  My father Leonard’s family was distant; his parents were people from whom he escaped as soon as he could, and who, after the divorce, weren’t there at all.  Somehow we also lost touch with the rest of his family, though many years later, there was a marvelous reconnection with his brother’s family and his aunt and uncle and cousin. My mother remarried to Phillip when I was 15, and I suddenly had 2 stepbrothers, and there were five siblings instead of three.`  My father remarried once, giving me 2 stepsisters, then again, then again, finally giving me a wonderful “wicked stepmother” Judie, and turning me into a “wicked stepdaughter.”  My mother and Judie became close, supporting each other through each husband's last illness, and still calling each other "my wife-in-law."

When my mother remarried, she invented a new kinship category that described the relatives of her husband’s first wife, who had died.  They became “our third family relatives.”  She continued to use that descriptor, without explanation, into the present, as if everyone knows the meaning of this kinship term. My mother also fostered many teens, who came to her for respite and an accepting environment.  This included some nieces and nephews as well as friends of friends of her own teens.  These latter sometimes became permanent family members, especially Bayla, who we always considered to be another sister.

When I married Steven, not only did we now have each other’s family as our own, we also took on all the official and non-official family that each of us had accrued.  Thus, his brother, Charles, became mine, but also his brother-in-law Calvin from his first marriage, became my brother-in-law as well. 

There have always been different ways that we have the children that we raise. However they come to us, they are our children, the foundation of our families.  We give birth to them, we adopt them, we foster them, we are drawn to each other as adults and adopt each other.  Their children are our grandchildren.  We also foster, adopt, and choose each other as grandparents and grandchildren.

Often, we become such close friends, that the relationship transcends even friendship and becomes family.  This has happened to me, to my husband, to our children, and to so many others. 

What is really important, it seems to me, is to acknowledge and cherish our families; however they come to be our fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, sisters, brothers.  And then to do so for their fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, sisters, brothers.   And moving on and outward through every connection and every generation, until we know without a doubt that we are all indeed part of the same family, connected irrevocably, our fortunes and fates linked forever.

He’s Gone

This was written right after our son left for his gap year in Israel, at the end of August.

My son is gone, having offered himself, arms stretching up to be caught by the enormous silver bird which will fly him to Israel.  His room is more than empty, it is void.  He considerately put all his things in the closet and drawers.  There is nothing on the walls, and only my old copy, loaned to him last year, of “The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide” on the shelves.  I appreciated his consideration until the moment when I opened the door, stared at the blank walls, and felt the pain of loss shoot into my gut and twist, thinking “oh no, I made a terrible mistake – I should have had him keep his things out so it would still look like his room.”

Anticipation of pain is not anything like feeling the pain.  Expecting to feel sad, I was surprised to feel devastated.  Telling myself that he’s alive and well, happy and excited, that I’m lucky in these and so many ways, didn’t help.

So many of my friends - my family - have already sent their young men and women off to college, to travel, to work, to live close-by, to live across the world.  Their support and their wisdom wrapped around me, holding me through the first few days which have been the hardest.

There are books and movies and poetry and songs about young people starting   their journeys into the future.  We don’t hear so much about the journeys of their parents, left behind to face a road that changed while they weren’t looking, suddenly facing a different direction with no signposts or maps.

Now I am half on that different road, with one gone and the other here.  And I am looking in a different way at parents who have traveled this road before me.  With children, everything is, in some way, related to their presence.  When they have gone, and we are without them, the empty spaces in our homes reflect those in our lives and hearts.  Eventually, after years of focus on getting our children to the next step, and the next after that, we begin to think about our own future. 

Joseph Campbell has written extensively on the mythic journey of the Hero, through a series of stages from the “call to adventure” through trials and important meetings with guides, to a supreme ordeal that changes the Hero forever, ultimately leading to return with inner powers and rewards.   When our young people set out on their own, they, too, experience a “call to adventure” which leads them into the lives they ultimately make for themselves. 

This stage of the journey for parents is also impelled by a “call to adventure,” but the “call” does not come to us.   As the ones left behind, how do we move beyond loss to envision a different direction for our lives?  What qualities can we find inside ourselves that help us to choose a direction and start moving?  How is the hero inside the parent different from that of the youth?