My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Posts Tagged ‘family’

Family Dynamics: What’s Love Got to Do With It?

by on ·Family, Opinion, The Way I See It

My family’s reunion was this past weekend. I wasn’t there. From what I heard on the grapevine and viewing photos, folks seemed to have had a good time, and that’s a good thing. A family affair should be a happy occasion.

I spent the past few days discussing family reunions with some friends and doing an unofficial survey. A few of them told me that their family never had reunions. One said he doesn’t know why they don’t have them. He said he once asked his older sister why the family had never had one, and she said no one wanted to do the work.

As I was jotting down notes from my survey, I remembered discussing the same subject decades ago with another close friend, Carol. She told me that her mother died when she was a child. She had a small extended family, and “We aren’t close at all.” She said. She affirmed what most folks know: a biological connection doesn’t always equal a love connection.

Carol went on to tell me that she and her older brother were very young when their mother died. She was around five; he was three years older. The two of them were separated and sent to live with different families, and as they grew up, they grew apart and eventually became estranged and lost touch. One day, when she was forty-something, as she was walking home from the grocery store, she and her brother happened to be approaching each other from opposite directions. He recognized her and called her name before she saw him. They greeted each other politely but didn’t exchange a so-happy-to-see-you hug. She said she was surprised but wasn’t excited to see him. “I didn’t feel any kind of way,” she said. “In essence, we were strangers.”

After chatting for a few minutes without exchanging phone numbers or other contact information, they said, “See ya’,” and each went along their way. Carol said she didn’t feel a familial relationship existed between them. A year or so later, someone told her that her brother had died and would be buried in two days. She didn’t attend the funeral.

After Carol told me about that encounter, I felt terrible for her and her brother. I couldn’t understand how kinfolk could be so alienated – until years later.

I recently read a humorous, thought-provoking anecdote: “When we are between middle age and almost dead, our perspective on many things tends to change.” That’s true. As I’ve grown older, once puzzling things have become crystal clear; being related to someone doesn’t mean you have to like them.

In an ideal world, family functions are a joyous occasion. It is an opportunity for everyone to mingle, catch up on old times, and have fun. But – REALITY CHECK – we don’t live in an ideal world, and just because folks are related doesn’t mean they have a love fest.

When I discuss the issue of family dynamics with other people, most agree that the family’s elders are the glue that holds the family together. Once the patriarch and especially the matriarch dies, the family ties unravel. Layers of resentment build and minor family feuds sometimes escalate into full-blown warfare. That brings me back to family reunions.

Family reunions are good for rekindling relations with kinfolk. So often, we don’t even get to talk to some family members except at funerals, and sometimes, due to time constraints, not even then.

My friend Gail told me that her family has a reunion every year. On my father’s side, there has been an annual reunion for as long as I can remember. My cousin Velda, who skillfully organizes every reunion on that side of my family, cleverly hosted the family reunion during the pandemic over Zoom, and we had a blast!

On the contrary, my mother’s side has a reunion every few years. Family reunions, in general, are often a mixture of familiar relatives and kinfolk who are so distant that they are practically strangers except for the shared bloodline. Take the last reunion I attended in 2018. Of course, I knew my surviving aunts and uncle, my numerous first cousins, and some of their children. On the other hand, several distant relatives I had never met were there, also. The beauty of a family reunion is that it facilitates the introduction of new or not previously known family members. However, good, bad, and ugly components sometimes surface at family gatherings.

The good – Genial kin. Because of the distance between where we live, I don’t see some of my favorite relatives as often as I’d like to, so when we do get together, we have a joyful time. We are close. They are the kinfolk I love unconditionally. Sadly, some of my faves are deceased aunts and uncles who live only in my memory, but like them, their offspring are kind-hearted, humorous, and genuinely loving folks.

The bad and ugly – Toxic kin. Remember the adage, “If we weren’t related, we wouldn’t even be friends?” Being related to someone doesn’t mean that you have to like them. I don’t know a family that doesn’t have at least one unlikeable drama queen or king (sometimes more than one). Those toxic kin are not physically ugly. It is their behavior. They are ugly because they are devious, insecure, miserable, and dissatisfied with their lives; therefore they thrive on gossiping and bad-mouthing others. Their reputation precedes them, so practically everyone knows who they are. Some folks try to avoid them inconspicuously; others tolerate them because we recognize that they are drowning in their misery.

As children grow up and mature, they form opinions about family members based on their interactions, and other family members occasionally influence them. I keep repeating it, but kinship doesn’t necessarily convert to friendship. Unfortunately, you don’t always love people just because you are related. You don’t even have to like them. What’s genetics got to do with it? Nothing. I treat family like I treat friends and acquaintances. If we get along, we’ll have a genuine relationship, but if our personalities don’t mesh, I avoid them like a plague.

Some folks don’t like to talk about family relationships. It’s like airing dirty laundry. But this subject is as fitting for scrutiny as any other topic. Everyone has a right to their perspective, to call it as we see it, and I just did.

 

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Blowing Leaves off Family Trees

by on ·Family, Genealogy

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.”

– Robert Frost, The Secret Sits

Ancestry.com is breaking up families, according to a segment today on The View. The cohosts discussed a case where a son requested a DNA kit from Ancestry.com and learned from the results that his dad is not his father. Instead, it turns out his father’s brother and his mom had an affair (the mom admitted it), and the man the boy thought was his uncle is his father. Upon hearing that, I felt like doing what one of the cohosts did: shout out to the uncle in my Maury Povich voice, “You are the baby’s daddy!” (LOL. I couldn’t resist.)

Revelations from Ancestry.com and enthusiastic genealogists everywhere expose secrets and blow more leaves off family trees than an F3 tornado.

All families have secrets. There are no exceptions; the rich, the famous, the poor, and the unknown have skeletons in the closet, and even pulverized bones sometimes yield secrets.

Years ago, when I took it upon myself to become the family genealogist, I began digging into my immediate and extended family history. I searched archival and other public records and solicited narratives from family members, who trusted me and divulged information on the condition that I bury it (and not in the pages of a book). Some of my sources are now deceased. Some writers would say that once the source dies, all bets are off. I’m not one of those.This sleuth unearthed revelations about a rape, a near-fatal abortion (not the rape victim), an ill-conceived and nearly disastrous intercontinental romance, out-of-wedlock births, and shotgun weddings. Decades ago, when morality and ethics were reverenced, some of those events were scandalous; today, many would not raise an eyebrow.

Unfortunately – or fortunately – depending on how you view it, all of our lives are an open book today, in many ways, thanks to Google. Who hasn’t done or experienced something we regret and hoped to conceal? It doesn’t matter whether the act occurred when we were young and dumb or old and foolish. In every family, remnants contributing to “the history of us” are everywhere. Even wrongdoings and foolish deeds that are not necessarily secretive await discovery. History can be covered up but not erased. It is stored in someone’s memory, logged in a journal, or tucked like a metaphorical note in a bottle waiting to be plucked from the ocean of time.

A family genealogist will inevitably come across some zits that are not secrets but are well-known truths, seldom discussed because they are embarrassing or unpleasant.

Just as there are two sides to every family, paternal and maternal, there are secrets aplenty. History. Herstory. Our stories.

Over the years, I’ve learned that before sharing “a secret,” one should think twice about the profound words of Benjamin Franklin, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

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Looking Back at The Funeral

by on ·Family, Journaling/Writing, Religion, The Way I See It

I wrote the entry below in my journal on May 11, 2014, the night before Mother’s Day, weeks before my ailing mother died, and days after her doctor called my siblings and me to his office to tell us what I had already presumed. (The fact that this is being published on Father’s Day is coincidental.)

Mother’s cancer had returned after three years in remission and a few months following her breast surgery. It was terminal. Her doctor said that chemo and other interventive efforts to prolong her life had been exhausted. The ire that led me to express angry feelings in my journal later that evening was not the result of the doctor’s disclosure. I became enraged after my sister told me over the phone that she and our mother were writing down service arrangements for mother’s funeral.

I knew that my exclusion from the planning was intentional because my sister and mother were members of the same religious organization and I purposely have no membership with any organized religion. The deliberate slight led me during that telephone conversation to decide that I would not attend my mother’s funeral. (Circumstances, which I’ll later explain, changed my mind. I did attend the funeral. My sister did not.)

My sister, brothers, and I each dealt with my mother’s pending death in our own way. I, as I often do, wrote through my pain, confiding and psychologically transferring my feelings to my private journal. Now, as the fifth anniversary of mother’s death approaches on June 18, I’ve decided to share, in my public journal, a condensed version of the entry I wrote on that Mother’s Day eve. For me revealing these thoughts and pent up emotions is cathartic. Others may see it differently, and that’s okay. And as much as I know I should resist saying this about that; I’m going to say it anyway – Whatever.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Dear Diary,

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. What a time to be writing this.

I won’t be attending mother’s funeral. People will wonder why — let them. While the service is underway, I will be here, at home, feeling a lot of things, but guilt will not be one of those emotions. I’ll probably be reminiscing.

Like every good mother, mom instilled pearls of wisdom in her children as she and dad raised the four of us. She never stopped giving us advice, even when we were adults. I remember following frequent news reports about the Jim Jones tragedy in Guyana that dominated the airways, mother and I had many conversations about how easily people are lured into cults. “Stay away from them,” she cautioned.

I detest the fact that mother ultimately disregarded her own advice when she joined an organization that in my opinion, is nothing less. Her decision curtailed our family gatherings and resulted in our family becoming distant in the past few years. I imagine that once mother leaves us we will be more estranged.

So often I think about family gatherings that we enjoyed at mom and dad’s home on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas until her conversion changed that. I miss those get-togethers. What kind of religious organization restricts members’ from participating in what they call “worldly” activities, birthdays included? How crazy is that?

They like to take control. Mother let them take over her life, and I will always believe that she ultimately came to regret it, though she would never admit it. Dad tolerated them because of mother but he turned a deaf ear to her request that he join a study group and he refused otherwise to have anything to do with the organization. He and I sometimes discussed the irony of the situation. How unfortunate that when he died in August 2006, mother invited them to eulogize his funeral. I don’t think I will ever get over that. It’s part of the reason that I cried so hard at dad’s funeral. I’m still pissed-off about it because I felt that dad was disrespected. If he could have sat up in his casket, pushed the lid off and said, “Hold it one damn minute. I’m not going out like this. Not like this.” He would have.

Although he didn’t regularly attend church, he was a protestant, not one of — them. When arrangements were being made for dad’s funeral, I told mother that I wanted one hymn included in the program. Just one. My favorite, “Amazing Grace.” She told me that was considered to be a pagan song. Therefore it wasn’t allowed. Well, darn, dad and I were both pagans then, weren’t we?

Since mother has assigned my sister to oversee her funeral arrangements, I am certain that I will not be asked if I have any input. Just the same, I am going to keep insisting that the program include the congregation singing Amazing Grace. The same song that I wanted sang at my dad’s funeral. Nevertheless, this woman persists.

Dr. Wayne Dyer says that “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.” I studied with the organization for a brief period even before my mother did. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted no part of any group that manages its members with what I consider nothing less than mind control. I’d say that exposure gives me props for knowing something about which I speak. Against the protest by my then friend with whom I was studying, I refused to succumb to the brainwashing and, I quit the sessions.

My presence at mother’s funeral would serve no purpose. Feeling as I do now, resentment would most likely lead me to show my annoyance during the service for the group that I feel stole my mother from our family long ago.

They profess to be nonjudgmental, yet they judge others every day, especially people who they label as pagans because pagans are of different faiths and are “of the world.” They spew a lot of hogwash about how they cannot fraternize with people of the world. Oh? Where the hell do they think they are on Mars?

I don’t see where they exclude themselves from taking part in worldly things – except those things they don’t want to participate in like jury duty or the armed services. Then, they quickly become religious objectors — if you can call it that.  They cheer for their favorite sports teams. They buy worldly convinces like automobiles and computers. They’ve even put their literature on the Internet. Are those not worldly things? And just like numerous other “Christians” some of them fornicate, lie, and commit crimes; and then they try to justify the bastardly deeds of their corrupt members by saying, “Oh that person was not truly one of us.” How many times have I heard that used to justify a wayward sheep?

I mourn for the person that my mother used to be. I feel that she was taken away from me a long time ago even though she had not yet left this earth. I have my peace, knowing that she will no longer be under their control. I hope that she has her peace.

An organization that philosophizes to its members that they are God’s chosen while putting other religions down is, in my opinion, hypocritical. Granted — it is every person’s choice to be a member of whatever religious group they choose – or to be a member of none. But what peeves me is when one religious organization condemns others while claiming that theirs is the only “truth.”

Ultimately, I did attend my mother’s funeral. It was my sister who chose not to do so. The unplanned situation that resulted in mother’s funeral arrangements being left to me by my sister was the result of some tense, back-and-forth conversation between us over my insistence that Amazing Grace be sung during the service. The minister my mother had requested perform the service strongly objected to including that hymn or any hymn associated with pagan religion and informed me through my sister that he would refuse to administer the funeral if I persisted. I did. In turn, my sister also refused to have anything to do with making the arrangements or attending the service.

You see her faith advises members against taking part in what they consider services associated with a “false religion.” A funeral is considered a religious service because it may include such practices as the congregation joining in prayer with a “worldly” minister or priest who is not of their faith, and God-forbid the funeral be held in a church. Mother’s was held in a funeral home.

People who purport yourselves to be God’s children — check yourselves. 

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