This Thing We Call "Family"

04.05.2010

I spent more time thinking about my mom and grandmother. See, I don’t get to talk to my mom on Skype that often and even less with my grandmother. Plus I over think everything, so it’s just natural for me to obsess about something.

Right before we were going to say our good-byes I asked my sister to take a photo of my mom and grandmother on Skype. They were so cute together, cuddling up, mother and daughter, making faces and/or my grandmother not really knowing where to look cause Skype still weirds her out. I was looking at the photo of the two of them today and I thought, “If I continue the route I’m going, I will never experience that.” What I was referring to was the fact that my mom and her mom were able to cuddle up with each other and regardless of their ages, they were still, and will always be, mother and daughter. “Mother and daughter…”

My mother-in-law asked me a few months ago if I would like to have a daughter first or a son. I started to chuckle and then ended in a sigh and replied, “I don’t know. Mother-daughter relationships are so volatile so I don’t know if I want to go through that. But then I don’t think I could ever relate to a teenaged boy, so I don’t know if I want to go through that.” She, of course, laughed at the comical way I delivered my line with such dramatic “my life is hard” flair, but underneath the comedy, I was actually quite serious.

Babies are all cute and cuddly but then they become these [fill in the blank] for about ten years and then you just hope that they forgive your parenting style and want to talk to you for the rest of their lives. Some families never overcome the schisms that may happen, others do. Or, at least, for the most part they do.

Why are families so complicated? It seems like it should all work out so perfectly. Girl meets boy, they fall in love, have the perfect wedding and start a family. But what you’re not told about is all of the little cracks in the façade that entail people’s personalities, dreams or failed dreams, hopes or broken hopes, desires, plans and changes in plans, changes in moods, etc. On paper it all makes sense. In practicality, it doesn’t. I’m not saying this because I’m not happy being married; God no! I’m just talking about how the steps to becoming a family and starting a family, etc. seem like it should all be so easy but no one tells you about how truly difficult it is. I always thought adults had it all figured out and now that I’ve officially been an adult for almost 20 years now, I’m still waiting for the light to turn on. I’m still waiting for that “a-ha” moment where I can say, “Oh, yes, so NOW I’m an adult because I have it all figured out.” I sometimes see the light flickering…but it never stays on long enough for me to definitively know.