You Can’t Choose Your Family
No one has the power to drive you totally wild with rage quite like a member of your own family. Whether it be an annoying dig by the brother who has pushed the same button since you were children, or a totally blinkered expectation from a parent who never quite accepted that you didn’t turn out as they had imagined, your family members manage to get under your skin in a way nobody else can.
What is it about family that has the ability to trigger us so immediately? And more interestingly, why do we readily extend them more patience and understanding than anyone else in the world no matter what they do (almost)?
Aside from grievous abuses of trust (and sometimes, even in the face of these), most of us are willing to forgive our family members of wrongdoings towards us, perceived or otherwise, that we would never dream of accepting from any other human being. Once the heat of an outrage has dissipated, we long to reconnect with them. Our threshold for patience and understanding is infinitely higher for them than for even our romantic partner.
There are few people in the world that you know as wholly as the people you grew up with and just as few who know you as completely in return (which is why they know exactly where that button is). It is common for us to reserve our best selves for friends and lovers for fear of losing or alienating them, while heaping our worst traits onto the people closest to us. But it’s the disclosure of our worst traits, along with our best, that reveals our true selves.
To unveil ourselves in this way, however, there must be a level of trust between family members – trust that they will not abuse the knowledge they have of our foibles by using them against us. Trust in itself is one of our most precious commodities and we grant it sparingly, so it’s when we believe it has been misused that we feel most betrayed.
In some ways, we believe that our family is duty bound to love and protect us, and we them, no matter what, because we’re FAMILY. The concept of family is dangerously saturated with connotations of safety, acceptance and compassion. Like the Hippocratic oath which states ‘first do no harm’, so too is family expected to guard against causing each other pain. This conviction that family never could, would or should hurt one another is what leaves all parties open to profound disappointment.
At the end of the day, though, it’s hard to stay mad at the brother who used to dance alone in his bedroom and kick the footy around in the backyard while commentating his own play, or the mother who stormed into your school to tell off your bully and later put up with your adolescent broodings. You may have nothing else in common with them, but these are the people who stood alongside you as you all grieved for a brother and father, who picked you up from the hospital after surgery, and who, when push comes to shove, you’ll be able to call on in any emergency, knowing they will be there – no matter what.
“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.”
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee