Monday, December 04, 2006

Familial/Civil Post

I write this with a portable phone in front of me contemplating calling various members of my family of birth.

A few weeks ago my sister got in touch with me in order to tell me that our baby sister is getting married and that my mother wants to hear from me. It’s been a good four years since I have talked to either of them over the phone and at least 20 since I have seen either of them.

For a long time I was in a quandary as to what is a healthy attitude towards ones family of birth in the context of healthy culture. I have since come to the tentative conclusion that the idea is to try to cultivate a living friendship as individual persons in the same way as I would with any body else.

Well, not quite in the same way. Birth family relations can be very coercive, non-egalitarian, and inwardly and outwardly factional in ways that have a greater psychic leverage than other kinds of relationships. I’m anticipating having trouble even bringing up the idea of healthy culture or living friendship with my mother (somewhat less so with my youngest sister). The recent conversation I had with my older sister pretty much left me feeling that she really didn’t want to actually know me at all, or have any kind of authentic two way communication with me about things that matter. I felt more that she was just trying to fulfill some role she conceives for herself as daughter to my mother and sister to me. I have felt the same thing when talking to my parents and other siblings in the past.

I know that feeling, but to act on it, in the light of my general understanding, feels phony and for most of my adult life I have avoided much contact with my family of birth. I guess my silence was a kind of protest against what I felt would be phoniness—often motivated in many people, more by the desire for a kind of “social security” or economic insurance than, from even any nobler feelings of duty or responsibility. But this avoidance has not felt quite right and about 5 year ago a made an effort to get in touch with my family.  I think it was becoming clear to me that, though my role and responsibility is not obedience to some fear-based social imprinting, I do know and remember these people and the possibility exists to challenge both myself and them with the necessity and possibility of transcending all of the sick culture between us and of co-creating a new kind of culture as friends and equals.

In my previous conversations so far though, I have not even been able to really even set this as a conscious intention.  What happens is that who ever I am talking to just goes on and on about who is doing what in the family and what they themselves are doing, avoiding any real inquiry about me except for more or less material and social-economic superficialities. After an hour or so of this, one of us has to go, and that’s it for communication of the next half-decade or so. I suppose doing this once every five years is enough of a relationship to satisfy them, but it makes me want to give up on the business altogether, since going along with such a charade is friendly neither to myself nor my family of birth. Most of me feels that it would be better to be honestly estranged from them then connected in so lame and superficial a way.

On the other hand, there is always the hope of upgrading the culture between us in the next communication. Moreover, if estrangement is going to happen, it should at least happen after an authentic argument and there has never really been time for even that so far. This is partly because of me and a kind of timidity and sentimentality that usually afflicts me when talking to members of my family…actually I have a hard time being severe with anybody right off the bat, though I get around to it when necessary. With my family though there is some added energy which, come to think of it, is probably related more to the fact that, unlike people still sharing a real familial venue, we don’t really have to relate to each other at all and that to succumb to the easy estrangement that is possible in such a situation would be tragic. For them I guess it would be tragic because of the guilt of failed duty and familial piety but, for me, I realize that it would be tragic because of a missed opportunity to transform our relationship in the light of healthy culture.

I want to plant the seed of healthy culture and living friendship between myself and the family of birth, just because I know them—or did know them, and so have an ongoing connection with them that makes this a possibility. If they are mostly strangers, still they are strangers of a special kind, so that coming to terms of real friendship with them—which will probably be more difficult than with normal strangers—would nevertheless be something very worth while for all involved. Keeping in touch with them is a way of continuing my experiments in how best to effect this thing.

Still, I am not sure if this way of doing so is not just fueling some coercive familial dynamic. I don’t know how much progress I’ll be able to make in today’s long distance phone call, which besides probably being rather brief, is really just a reactionary response to my sisters response to the event of a marriage in the family. It occurs to me to begin being more deliberate and proactive this kind of communication. I think I’ll try starting a course of letter-writing to some members of my family soon.  Maybe this call will just serve to keep the door open for those letters, and so for the possibility of a healthier connection between myself and my family of birth. If so it will still have been a good thing to do.

Postscript:

Well I called my mom just now. Not home. No answering machine. I called my little sister and she was also not home, so I left a message. Just my luck, get my intention all sharpened up to challenge the status quo and  it goes into hiding.
Any way, certainly I will keep trying.

Post postscript:

It's now probably more than a month since I wrote the above. I meant to post it immediately but my own computer is only for word processing and for various reasons its taken me this long to get the floppy into an internet computer.

Anyway, I finally got in touch with my folks (my mother over the phone and the sister who is getting married via email). I told them both a lot of what I mention in this post and tried to set an intention of real listening supporting and challenging friendship between us and both of them agreed to this in principle.

The reality though is that nothing has really happened since those conversations. Things are basically back to where they were before then. I think that it is more or less up to me to get things rolling and yet I feel the same old inhibition about it. In part I guess its a realistic sense that, without some non-virtual experience to inspire the sustained commitment necessarily to begin to cultivate--or even understand--the kind of healthy friendship  I want to create, there is nothing really to work with. Its not that I don't care whether or not they understand or experience healthy culture, its just that I don't see how this can effectively be transmitted long distance in their case. At the same time, I don't see how, short of moving into the neighborhood (in some relatively autonomous situation),  I could even keep their attention about it.

Also, at such long distance of time and space I feel I can only make a civil appeal to them, the same appeal to good will that I would make to anybody (and that I am implicitly making to you the reader). And my memories and my recent conversations don't really lead me to believe there is much to "invest in" there. For example, my mother spent much of our phone call recapitulating her version of Baptist Christianity in a way that leaves me with the impression that , for her, goodwill is more about saving strangers souls before God comes back than figuring out how to catalyze ones own healing together with that of our society. Neither the prospect of showing her otherwise, nor of some more creative comming-to-terms, nor of being convinced of her views in preference to mine (which I tend think should never be excluded out of hand) seem at all likely over the phone. The prospect of attempting it is somewhat exhausting to even think about. It seems much more realistic to just continue for look for those few "co conspirators' who are already relatively predisposed and motivated in this direction, create a living healthy culture between us that can be amplified and that hopefully, grow as a kind of "cultural singularity" both arithmetically and exponentially. At some point we life-dancers can expose our families of birth to this living possibility in a way that is likely to be both more helpful both to ourselves and them.



Still, there is probably more to my reluctance than what I've said so far and, though I am not sure what it is, its possible that that some lingering faith in apart-ness on my part is behind it.  I want to challenge myself at any rate to initiate contact with both my sister and my mother at least once before my next familial post.

posted by: piankhy | 19:35 | comments