Family Politics Suck!

I wish I could tell you the stories motivating that title, because they are really good stories, and they come both from my own family and the family to which I am an in-law. It’s not that I can’t tell them, but rather that I choose not to, at least not in a public forum like this blog, because at least some of the people involved would be deeply hurt by being so exposed, while others would feel that the act of telling itself meant I was taking sides against them in the conflicts those stories touch upon–which of course means that the people on the other side of that conflict would see in my telling of the tales a declaration of my alliance with them. Then there are the people whose childishness, spitefulness, manipulativeness, dishonesty or whatever–at least from my point of view; because they, I am sure, don’t see themselves that way–would be brought into the light; and they too don’t deserve the inevitably one-sided image of who they are that would emerge were I to name them and tell my version of the stories in which they are involved–because, after all, as the title already tells you, I am not happy about the feelings that have compelled me to put aside for an hour or so the work I have to do so that I can write this.

Neither would telling many of these stories portray me in the most flattering light. In the most recent instance, for example, acting on what turned out to be partial and even completely, and perhaps unintentionally, false information from a source we had no reason to doubt, my wife and I came out swinging in what we thought–not unreasonably, given what we knew–was going to be a huge family fight, and we said some very hurtful things to people who had done nothing to deserve it. Embarrassing, and even humiliating, as that was, however, it’s not the end of the world. Once we understood what had happened, we apologized as quickly as we could, and the people who were willing to accept our apology accepted it. Those who will hold a grudge will hold a grudge, and there’s really nothing we can do about that except realize they would likely have found a grudge to hold no matter what we did. The bad taste of this experience, I am sure, will linger for a while, not least in our own mouths, because in hindsight (of course!) we can see with perfect clarity the moments when–if we’d known what we know now–we could have chosen a different course of action and avoided the whole thing. The bad taste, too, however, will fade–for those who will let it–and this will become yet one more story in the catalogue of stories that makes up not just the family history but that contains the cumulative meaning of the relationships between and among family members.

Such stories–and when, whether, by whom and why they should be told–are at the root of the situation I just described, but the contested nature of such stories is at the heart of every family difficulty I can think of. In my own family, for example–and I can be specific here because these are facts that no one disputes–is the fact that my twin sisters have essentially not spoken, by my count, for more than 15 years; the fact that I have cousins on my mother’s side whom we were not able to see for most of the lives they have lived until now; and the fact that I did not speak to my father for a decade. In each case, the silence that separates or separated the people I have just named was the result of story or, more properly, of the battle between and among the those who controlled the narrative for whose version would win out. The ironic thing, of course, is that silences like those I’ve just described make everyone into losers–not just the people whose silence is at issue, but all those around them who have to negotiate that silence and whose lives within the family are therefore shaped by it.

Neither this movement back and forth between story and silence nor the power struggles that surround it are ever going to stop, not in my family, not in my wife’s family, not in the families of those of you who are reading this; and so I am writing this morning not in protest, not in the hopes of changing things, but because I feel right now, more acutely than I have felt in a long time, the weight of the silences that surround me, that I hold within me, that I stand within; and I feel as well the weight of stories, those that I know–whether I have told them or not–and those that I don’t know, whether I will ever hear them or not. We all carry this weight. Talking about it like this sometimes makes it feel a little lighter.

Cross-posted.