My Sad Sob Story
After looking at both options to write about for this I can say that I do not relate to either at a very personal level. Most of these blogs I have to try extremely hard to find a way to make something that isn't very big or happens often in my family as a big deal.
For me, I don't have a big tradition with my family. My parents kept the fact that we had grandparents, aunts, uncles and, cousins from us. So most of my life I grew up believing that I had zero family.
My immediate family and I spent all of our holidays and birthdays with just ourselves and family friends that we would call family but, we would move so much that the people who we spent our time with was always changing.
When I first actually met my grandparents I was in the third grade and that was only because they looked my mother up online and found her address. I didn't know who they really were until I was in the fourth grade.
When my grandparents walked into my life my parents took up everything and moved us across the state to get away from them. (People in my family don't deal with confrontation very well.)
As the years went on my grandparents began to try harder and harder to get into our lives and my mother finally gave in to meeting them and later let them begin to have a relationship with my siblings and I.
When we began to get closer my dad packed us all up and moved as to the great state of Minnesota filled with their 10,000 lakes and gazillion killer mosquitos. My relationship with my grandparents was put on hold by all of these moves.
After six years of living away from the only family we have my parents finally decided to “come back home”. But, at this time in my life these people hardly seem like family. I've spent the majority of my childhood without the grandparents the aunts, the uncles, and the cousins.
I am not a fan of these posts because even though they are supposed to be easy it is hard to me to relate to big traditions with my family because I have do not know them long enough to have a long term tradition or a process orientated tradition either.
Even now my family doesn't get together on holidays as much. Somebody doesn't like someone and don't want to look at them or, your grandparents disown them before you even get the chance to develop a relationship with that person.
I wish my family loved each other or that I knew them more than I do. For me it sucks thinking that I have zero traditional family gatherings to complain about or a process orientated tradition that we do.
Even though not having that kind of sucks I am still incredibly lucky and blessed. Sometimes I forget that I have more than other people with parents and siblings who I know will come to my side when I need them.
Hi Bella,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry to hear that your family is so troubled. But think of it this way: there are ways of approaching the blog posts that don't require personal identification. For example, you could choose the option of responding to one of the stories: what captured your interest (or not) about it, and what you think the story was trying to achieve and why. Or, you can ask neighbors or friends; you don't have a process tradition, for example, so seek out people who do and find out why. It doesn't have to be about you. However, it still can be--by raising your family's history, you could use it to make a point about what you see as problematic, or what you would like to change with your own life. Remember, the reason why we're blogging these responses is because of Nathaniel Rivers' point: writing, even something like a blog, creates what we expect and want to see in the world. There's nothing wrong with taking that approach: I don't like what was "normal" for my family and upbringing, so here's what I want people to understand about it and how I want others to do better.
And by the way, this isn't a sob story; it's an endurance story. Don't ever let anyone tell you those are the same thing.;-)
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