Finding Your Way

So after a hectic day in which I discussed my menstrual cycle with the internet (fun!) and then had a crazy work afternoon (Whee!) and realized that I couldn’t do my planned workout because the muscles I pulled in my ribs when I tried not to fall off a chair while hanging curtains were making breathing painful, so I could pretty much forget about resistance training (sweet!) I managed to get into an ,um, tiff with someone I love dearly (awesome!).

Monday: 4

Danielle: 0

The thing is … the only thing that’s really bothering me, because all of the other things are managed, can be managed, will be managed … is the last one. The tiff-y one.   Because, you see, it’s about family. Maybe not the family that I was born into (though we certainly have our moments as well), but the family I have constructed for myself, the way we all do.

The problem and the joy of family is that, at the end of the day, they’re there.  So sometimes we’re more blunt with them, less studied and more honest.  Weirdly, because we love them, we say things to them that we wouldn’t say to other people;  we actually might be more concerned with the feelings of people we care less about, because … well, they’re not a member of the tribe.  You wouldn’t say: “You need to stop beating yourself up, because it’s not worth it,” to someone random, but you might say it to family. You wouldn’t take honesty to a level where you make someone cry if you don’t care for them deeply, want to help them through and over and around whatever patch of quicksand they are stuck in.  

Ah, but we also can fight with family in a way that we fight with no one else, right? Because we also know which buttons to push. When family says something that touches a nerve or that we don’t want to (or aren’t ready to) hear, we know exactly which arrow to pull out of the quiver and, at the same time, precisely where to aim. 

The older I get, the more I understand that family relationships – both biological and created – are a series of navigations. Sometimes, I think, you can rely on tried and true maps, the paths that have always worked for you, the compass rose that points the way. Other times? You have to chuck all of it and use the stars as your guide, slowly feeling your way to where you are getting to.  And it is, after all, about feeling. It’s about love, at the end of it: love is the basis for every journey families take. The easy ones and the difficult ones. It’s what starts them and what finishes them.

Even when someone has said something regrettable.

Even when someone else reacts in pointed self defence.

Even when the words come out the wrong way.