At this late hour, I want to share some thoughts on family - because these thoughts have been turning around in my head for the whole evening because of some unexpected things happening in my family. I won’t go into details here, there’s no need and it would probably cause a lot of trouble anyways.
I am lucky to have a big family. The parents of my father have several sisters and brothers. Their descendants are sometimes hard to keep track off. My father has three brothers, my mother has three sisters and if I have counted right, there are ten cousins alltogether.
In my own family, the counting is a little bit more difficult, but I have to confess that there is quite a large group of people that I would consider to belong my direct family: my mother, my father, my grand-parents, my sister, her brother, their mother, their grandparents, my relatives, my host-family from the States, the family of my supervisor, even to some extent close friends and the families of close friends.
When I think about them, they make me think of a “family”-feeling which is hard to describe. What is that feeling? Is it knowing each other for a long-time? Is it the feeling that these relationships have moved to another level of close-ness? I don’t know really. It’s maybe knowing that they are part of me and me being part of them - even though that sounds very weird writing it down like that.
We have a lot of family reunions in the family. Birthdays, holidays, sometimes marriages. The good things about reunions is that you know what to expect: your relatives get older, you get updates what has been happening, if it’s a birthday or a marriage the focus is on them for a day, but there’s nothing unclear about family reunions. When I visited my aunt in Hungary, there was an immediate link to my last visit five years ago. When I visited my relatives in Canada, there was an immediate link to their visit two years ago. Sometimes there are small surprises, for instance when all of us sang evergreens at my grandmother’s birthday this year. But this “link” was there and “immediate link” does not need constant rebuilding, but is just there, it is what constitutes “family”.
Family is something that you can not escape for real. Maybe ignore, but never really escape. When I look in the mirror, I see my parents. When I see my sister, I see her brother, her parents, her grandparents. And with some friends I see their parents in a similiar way - I know where they come from and what has influenced them - this feeling of knowing who they are also constitutes “family”.
Pride and sometimes anxiety - that also constitutes “family”. My mother has some big adventures ahead of her, which make me really worried but I feel immensely proud that she is undertaking this big step, but I can’t wait to see her back. My father is doing small steps every day and thus is working gradually towards the big goal. He made the big step into unkown wilderness already, and that’s in my eyes very impressive. My sister has made so many big steps already which has put her so far ahead of me, even though she is much younger. Since I can see her blush already, I’ll keep my praise when I see her at the weekend.
Last weekend, when talking with very close friends, I noticed something that I had somehow thought before but never realized it like that: how difficult it is for parents to teach children to have trust in other people, to be curious about the a world filled with dangers on every corner. If a child can just lean back into the world, and feel the support from somebody, sometimes a lot and sometimes just a little, this makes “family”, I think.
