My Family--enough already

to listen to an audio recording of this post come to my site:  http://miriamfeder.com/in-voice/my-family-enough-already/ and stay to listen to more of my weekly pod casts.

I’ve said I was done with my family. Not meaning to be cruel, mind you. I just need to be free for a bit. I’ve earned it. They’ve been taking up an extraordinary amount of my bandwidth, what with the usual proving myself good and worthy, writing and performing pieces of them, and feeling haunted by the oppressive suffering some of them endured. And especially so, considering that most of them are dead.

Yes, this is the astonishing thing—or is it one of those “astonishing things” that is perfectly apparent and mundane? Perhaps the amount one considers family members in daily life is in inverse proportion to the amount of family one regularly sees. I’m not representing this as any kind of principle or even as a belief someone, let alone me, actually holds. But if Suzie Psychologist wants to cook up a research project using this thesis, she ought to interview me.

The other odd thing about the space, time and thought I devote to my family is that I gave them little thought or interest throughout most of my life, when they were alive. Again maybe this is one of those perverse, oh excuse me, inverse, relationships, or maybe that big old fat subconscious just plays these tricks on us.

I certainly didn’t consider my family’s well-being when I was a younger person. I didn’t miss my parents or long to see them. In fact I took my first obvious opportunity to get out and I never much went back—even when it would have made sense to do so—except for cramped short visits that seemed obligatory. Is this one of those “don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” kind of things? Or perhaps we simply cannot overestimate our parents’ power over our unconscious processes. Now that the real day-to-day demands have, for the most part, slipped away, maybe this power slips out into my more conscious substrate.

Let’s take a little inventory here—who exactly is my family? I have the tiniest family. I am an only child—so siblings are out. I’m divorced, so although I have one “outlaw” I still connect with, when the official “in-law” family stampeded in eager renunciation of me, I kissed good-by the obligatory holiday visits and such with no regret.

My Father died almost twenty years ago. He was the youngest child of a youngest child—both families were large. His grandparents and aunts and uncles were all dead before I was born. His cousins were elderly. My youngest first cousin is 16 years older than me and the removed’s, while quite connected among sibling groups, have only limited contact with me. Ah, the removed’s. Why was I so good at figuring out the proper name for each and every type of cousin?

My Mother and Father were both the children who moved far from home—an admirable trait I emulated. But we lost a lot of connections in the process. My Mother is living but is quite deteriorated with Alzheimer’s disease. Hitler did in most of her family almost seventy years ago and time has taken the rest. I see Mom regularly and I’m curious how deep the continuing connection really is. But on the surface it goes one way.

So family is me and my daughter—my pride and joy, the object of day-to-day thoughts and no weight upon my sub-conscious, thank goodness.

I remember consciously instituting a practice to try and remember my parents and the experiences we shared. I had become concerned that pressure, shame, the demands of others and my own psychology had caused me to dismiss most of my significant connections. Oh yes I had limited interest in uncovering the wounds and missed connections of childhood. Mostly, though, I was motivated by the desire to share the old and forgotten worlds of my family with my daughter.

It may be true, for the sake of argument, that I missed much of my own life and neglected or suppressed the important intersections with parents. Maybe I failed to express my love or enjoy theirs. Maybe I misconstrued their lessons and behavior. Maybe there was something more to be gotten—or something less. But I no longer worry that I simply missed these things. I’m satisfied with what I’ve dredged up, adopted and housed; I’ve done yeoman’s duty recording, sharing, and paying homage.

I’ve been told I know a remarkable amount about my family members. Not surprisingly, my parents were very verbal people and I was a captive audience. I was never dismissed to the “children;” I was clutched in the mainstream of my parents’ lives. They consciously shared the bygone worlds they were raised in. They understood these worlds that had vanished and they held them, often tenderly in their strange way, for one another. They passed these memories on to me and it’s taken me this long to actually see and place the old neighborhoods firmly enough to let go and leave the room. But now that I’ve put so much of this memory through my own process, I feel lighter and freer from the certainties and uncertainties. Good by to all –-well, some—of those thoughts, superstitions, traditions, intolerance, confinement, chiding, reproach, and shame. I’m going to close the door on the archive for now.