You Can't Choose Your Family: Sometimes It's a Bitch

As the Old Year winds down and the New one is nearly dawning, traditionally it is a time of reflection and putting the past months to rest in favor of future days. People talk of resolutions and promises and changes that need to come. I think more couples get engaged in the time between Christmas and New Years than they do at any time of year, other than perhaps Valentine's Day-- for some reason, people get swept up in the emotions that come at the close of the year. After February or so, the talk of diets and saving money typically dissipates, fades and disappears altogether as the wheel of the year turns, and we are caught up once again in our day-to-day minutia and doing what needs to be done in the moment.

Photography © 2012 by Heather L. Gibson

The moments I live for are the little ones-- the ridiculous laughter sparked by an often-childish observation or dirty joke, or the moment when a butterfly alights on a flower less than a foot away, or when a lizard makes eye contact with you for five minutes without a break. Sometimes it can be a whiff of scent, often unidentifiable, yet one which immediately transports you back twenty or thirty years to a place and time you haven't thought about in ages. Or even the seemingly inane, like posting something to Facebook that you didn't think was particularly profound, only to receive an unexpected outpouring of positive responses from friends and strangers alike. You just never know when these little moments will come about. But when they do, they make all the difference in the world. They are the moments that have kept me breathing in and out, blinking, and moving.

This time of year could have the power to make me extremely bitter and sad. I see all of my extended family members getting together with their kids, their kids' spouses and other halves, their kids' kids, their pets and the whole nine yards, often hundreds and thousands of miles away, without so much as a thought or a care for me or my only immediate family, my parents. I remember the times spent with them all as a child, and the bonds forged by not only blood but simply by familial love. I also remember the rifts and the reconciliations. What I remember most is my own efforts to keep those bonds taut and connected between us, because I honestly believed that despite the time and the distance and the differences, family was family, and the love between us was all that mattered.

Unfortunately (and ironically), in this day and age of constant connectivity, despite the fact that people are online and texting every moment of every day, posting videos and photos and documenting trips to the store, dinners out, birthdays and anniversaries, the effort to drop a simple line or reach out for ten seconds to ask how I am seems to be too much to initiate, much less think about doing. I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't hurtful to me. The oft-used excuse of how everyone's lives are so complicated and busy "these days" reeks of bullshit to the outermost reaches of the Universe. If people were as busy as they claim to be, they wouldn't have time to text and post and Tweet every moment of their days to those who truly mattered to them.

Because of the "miracles" of technology, I have been able to peek into their lives out of curiosity, and have found, in one case in particular, that shallow, needy, narcissistic behavior gets fed the most readily. Genuine thought, intellect and humor are not so easily recognized, validated or commended. Meaning, I have a relative who is a complete mental midget when it comes to common sense or real intellect. She does however have a drink in her hand and a smile plastered on her face in 99% of the thousands (yes, thousands) of selfies she has posted over the years, and demonstrates a desperate need for attention and validation. If she were sixteen, I could almost excuse it. The fact is, she's passed the age of thirty (and in further demonstration of her narcissism, wastes no time in announcing periodically how many days it is until her birthday, so that no one will forget this oh-so important date in history). She is skinny and "cute," and manages to charm virtually anyone around her, from her coworkers to her family/extended family, to the guy at the drive-thru window at Tim Horton's. She is the all-around good-time gal; she is the "free spirit." She has a Masters Degree in Education (more irony) and the highest she's taken it is working in a daycare center-- from which she was fired for leaving a kid in the bathroom unattended. She likely didn't want to get babyshit on her manicure.

She's the type who would wreck a few cars and still bounce right back with a smile and a shrug, twirl around and shake her ass in a cloud of confetti and pink glitter and unicorns, and all would be forgiven. She loves to throw f-bombs to prove she's one of the guys, and her failed relationship statuses read like warnings to all others struggling to find True Love in this crazy, mixed-up world. She's picked herself up by her brastraps each and every time a boyfriend was dumped, dusted herself off, and loudly proclaimed (to anyone within earshot) that she was a confident, strong, independent woman who would face this latest challenge with a plethora of abstract nouns that she no doubt had to dig out of a thesaurus (or a deep-thoughts meme someone else shared on Facebook). And people eat it up and dump the praise and the empathy on her by the bucketful.

Which is exactly what she wants.

While she is by no means an intellectual, she is conniving and cunning, and she knows exactly how to win people over to get exactly what she wants, and to be viewed in just the light she wishes to be seen. It baffles me that honesty and integrity (and a bit of brains, if I might be so bold) doesn't seem to garner the same kind of respect or following. But perhaps it has more to do with the fact that she appears to be a size 2, and my size would probably go into three digits, if clothing sizes went that high. I'd prefer not to believe that to be the case, but it's the only logical explanation I can seem to find. Which further proves to me that this is a really messed-up planet on which we live.

She has never made any effort to be connected to me or my family, except when she wanted something. My parents have always invited all of our extended family members to visit us wherever we happened to be living at the time, to even accompany us on summer vacations (for which they would often supplement/foot the greater part of the bill). The only time this one ever decided to express her vague interest in visiting was to ask to tag along with her parents and bring along a college friend (since she would no doubt be bored to tears otherwise). My parents had no extra room to put up another body, not out of meanness or selfishness-- they literally had no room to house another person-- so the trip never happened. Her parents-- my father's brother and wife-- never managed to come down to visit, either. I thought it kind of took some massive balls that would fit nicely into a cannon to assume that she could bring along a friend on a long-distance family trip and expect that accommodations would instantly be made, particularly to family she had never spent any real time around willingly (all on the presumption of being bored; then why come to visit at all?). Fast-forward about 15 years later, when she inexplicably sends a Christmas card to my parents. I'm sure there can't possibly be a correlation between that and the fact that she's had a steady boyfriend of about half a year who she now calls "the love of my life" at every opportunity. Answer: buttering up for a wedding gift, $$ cha-ching $$. Her "charm" may work on the average dope, but her self-serving wiles are not lost on those of us with half a functioning brain, let alone those of us that actually use the greater part of one for something more than keeping up with the Kardashians.

Further irony is this: She is a first cousin; we share a great deal of DNA. She is also an only child, yet we appear to have been raised under a completely separate set of values and rules (or perhaps another planet). She is someone with whom you would have thought I would share a great deal in common and closeness due to family and such. Nope.

Then there are other members of my tree: Those who shroud themselves in equal parts postured piety and general buttinsky-ness. Their actions have basically torn whatever fabric there was between us apart, for foolish and selfish reasons, over division of objects of purely sentimental (read: not monetary) value, the irony being that there was zero sentimentality on the part of those who took it upon themselves to determine the division (or outright discarding) of the spoils.

Photography © 2006  by RMcP

Enter my fourth cousin, Bob, who was born in Scotland, with whom I share a common ancestor-- my great great grandfather, who is his 2nd great grand uncle (my gr gr grandfather and his gr gr grandmother were brother and sister, if that helps). We were introduced by a third cousin once removed, Lillian, who found me via Ancestry.com in November 2006. Bob and I immediately embarked on an email correspondence rivaling any other I'd experienced to that point in my lifetime. As a matter of fact, at times I felt as though I were reading my own writing. I'd never met anyone else in the world who crafted such detailed paragraphs to convey their thoughts. It was refreshing, as was his distinctly British sense of humor-- a humor I myself had appreciated since my teen years through early exposure to Monty Python and The Young Ones. He found my obsession with Hugh Laurie and Alan Rickman to be charming, and he loved that I got all of his Blackadder references. During our first contact, he even shared photos of the graves of our great great great grandparents who are buried in the kirkyard of Rhu and Shandon Parish Church in Helensburgh, which his family had been tending for a hundred years or more. I immediately choked up, as I had longed since my mid-twenties to one day see a stone etched with the family name on Scottish soil. He and I are still close to this day, sharing support, private thoughts and stories with each other, and hope to meet up beyond Skype sessions either here in the U.S. or overseas. He feels like a long-lost egg-roommate that I never had, which is an odd sensation to one who has been an only child for close to half a century. I feel blessed for having him come into my life. Far more blessed than those who are technically "closer" to me on the tree, let alone living on the same continent.

I suppose if I wanted to be Zen about it, I would say something really deep like "People choose their actions, with whom they wish to keep company, and what they wish to do with their time." All true, and I wouldn't ask anyone to do something that they really didn't wish to do. When it was me who was making all of the effort, they were nothing but kind, receptive, warm and wonderful. And not in a fake, forced way-- their responses and interactions were always genuine and well-intended, and there was a mutual enjoyment in our conversations and connections. But as soon as the effort-- my effort-- was removed or paused, they disappeared. I never made great demands to monopolize their time, nor would I ever wish to take time away from their daily goings-on. But as soon as I disappeared, so did their seemingly genuine interest.

This behavior is not only relegated to family-- I experienced this same kind of callous treatment from other loved ones as well. I can recall sending letters, cards and care packages to an ass with whom I had fallen in love 20+ years ago (never mind that he would not reciprocate in the same way, save for late-night phone calls or internet chats). The *second* I ceased my trips to the post office, he called in a very whiny, pouty tone to kvetch that he hadn't received anything in the mail that day from me. I was like, are you kidding me with this shit? Unfortunately, it took me another 10 years (on and off) to realize just what a selfish, egomaniacal prick he really was, never mind the tender geek tendencies and his off-the-charts IQ. I'm rather befuddled to report that he is happily married now, in a manner of whatever passes for happiness these days in his world.

I really don't know what I'm trying to say here, other than I suppose you can't choose your family-- you make your family-- and that I wish for my resolution for 2015 to be to not really care about what others think or say, or don't say-- without being a selfish, unfeeling monster. It's a fine line, and easily blurred. Perhaps I will find the balance without losing myself, much less losing my Self to bitterness anymore. Perhaps I will learn what I should have learned 30-odd years ago: To listen to and love the ones who truly love me, and basically say fuck off to anyone else who doesn't. But in a nice way. Maybe. Not sure about the nice part yet.

I have to quote my girl Stevie here: "Sometimes it's a bitch, sometimes it's a breeze."  Well, Jon Bon Jovi wrote the lyrics. But despite that unfortunate factoid, they feel right when paired with her voice.