Family Ties

Things got much better after my previous entry. It was rather overdramatic. I just got caught up in the moment, as I often do, and once I begin writing out my frustration, I tend to work myself up into quite a frantic state.

Last night I went to my brother and sister-in-law’s house for dinner. It was the first time all four Zelnick children sat down and had dinner together in years. It was so wonderful to see them, and my absolutely adorable nieces, Luisa who’s five and Maeve who’s two. They are, quite possibly, the cutest children to ever exist and I loved getting to spend some time with them. It was so lovely to sit at that table, our father, the parent we all share, with his four children around him. My half siblings are a great deal older than me (Nate’s 38 and Jenn is 41), and I love uncovering more and more stories about their lives with each visit. It’s taken me twenty years to begin to really have an interest in my family, but I’m glad that I’ve discovered that feeling. Family is so important.

For most of my life, I’ve considered my friends my family, and the people I’m related to were just this secondary group that I had obligations to. I still do, of course, consider my friends family, but I’ve also begun to really appreciate the connections I have with my relatives, both good and bad. I want to understand where I came from. I want to understand why I’m me, and tracing the patterns in my family’s past helps to put the pieces together.

It’s somewhat painful to be twenty years old and suddenly realize I know so little about my family members. I consider my parents to be fairly secretive and I struggle to drag the information about their lives from them. It’s agonizing to pull and squeeze their stories from them, the way I have to sometimes wrestle a word onto a page. It’s that endless fight to create more, to know more. It’s not impossible to get it from them, it just doesn’t flow from them naturally and I always wish that it would. I wish that I could just open their heads and see the story of their lives. I wish that they had written autobiographies about their triumphs and failures. Every time I read a memoir, I think about the author’s children, about how lucky they are to get this glimpse into their parents past.

I look at other children and think about who they’ll grow up to be. When I baby-sit, I always pay close attention to how the family interacts together, how the house is set up, what the rules for them are and how well they’re enforced. I take notes in my head to track the progression of each child as they get older, desperately seeking that perfect formula for what makes a family work. I don’t know what makes a family work. I’ve never lived in a family that does work, a family where all the pieces fit together perfectly, a family filled with love and happiness.

Often in my life, I have these snippets of realizations about what life should be and how my life isn’t it. I spend time with the families of my friends and find myself thinking “oh, THAT’S how it works,” as if it’s some new idea that family members should get along with one another. I began doing the same thing with marriages the day my parents told me they were getting a divorce. I paid close attention to the married couples I know, seeing the respect they have for one another, the affection they show each other, the love they share. It suddenly makes so much sense that my parents’ marriage didn’t work, and each time that I discover it, it feels as though I’m learning it for the first time, as though I couldn’t have ever seen it otherwise.

Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t want to. It’s difficult to compare yourself to others, to be constantly reminded of how your life could be, should be, better. It’s difficult to admit that things aren’t working, and at the same time, I take great pleasure in seeing that things are working for other people, other families, even if they aren’t for me. I love spending time with families that get along. I love my friends who are married and those who have been dating forever. I love the way that they all give me faith in love. I often need the reminder. I need to remember that even if things didn’t necessarily work out in my family’s past, having a family that “works” in my future is not an impossibility. Good relationships are possible. Happiness is possible. Love is possible, and I intend to move on into the new year, keeping that in my mind and feeling it in my heart.