Family bombed
This piece is from the series “A Loving Lens,” a collection of essays written to help us consider what else is possible…
My friend Ella let out a sigh. Actually it escaped in between the breath she was holding while talking about her mom, who was now living with her and scrutinizing her life choices on a regular basis.
“I know she loves me and I get that she’s unhappy, but she keeps telling me how I never could follow through on things. How I’ll never find what I’m looking for because I give up before it can happen.”
The recurring verdict came from Ella’s decision to call off her wedding four decades earlier. She’d been branded ever since. Family quitter. Slacker. Reverse go-getter. It wasn’t exactly a one-off, but it was step up enough from earlier childhood forays of leaving vegetables on her plate and not finishing chores to put the proverbial icing on her noncake. Her siblings, each competing for their own maternal alignment, agreed with their mother.
That the groom-to-be-until-death-did-she-part was abusive had gotten selectively lost across the ethers, and that Ella had since achieved resounding success in several careers didn’t move the needling. Her mom continued involuntarily enrolling her in Never-never Land, that imaginary terrain where family members void each other’s realtime qualities and achievements by substituting them with expired counterparts and fatalistic predictions.
We’d lamented this formula before: you were once X, therefore you will never be Y. Family identity as life sentence. Pigeonholed by the past, eternally etched in perceptual purgatory.
Family bombed.
A family bomb is a lobbed stamp of ineptitude offered in the guise of knowing you well Forged on familiarity with your emotional points of entry reminding your mind of a time you’d otherwise forget
So too it went for my friend Isaiah who, despite being the family peacekeeper, was deemed a passive loser by his dad . Ditto for Marisol, crowned Miss Irresponsible for traveling the world on her resourcefulness, and Jesse, a prosperous freelancer considered Mr. Can’t Hold a Steady Job. All were bombarded with defunct descriptors that instantly obfuscated a lifetime of growth. Future potential taken hostage by choice points exercised at age 5.
Family bombers disburse stymieing prickles primed to abrade even the thickest generational skin their wake leaves a miasma of doubt About whether you’re 40 or 5, if the in-betweens happened at all, and if you can ever really Perforate predictions.
In light of our familial susceptibility, of being exiled for evolving, how can we dodge the bombs and appreciate our own evolution?
What does it mean to meet ourselves with who we are today, including our medalless triumphs? How do we court our living Nature?
One way is to question questionable judgments, to look past the crassness and into self-regard. Instead of absorbing their destructive combustion, use it to destroy your own complacent negations of who you truly are.
Like a double-edged saber, a family bomb offers an opportunity to slice core wounds that When left unchecked leave untruths ruling our emotional roost.
Once open, we can reroute doubt and sprout our own Knowing that we are ever growing, that life is a succession of progressions we are continuously unfolding beholden to the evolution of our essence.
Noticing that bombs often drop just as you are perched on progress can also affirm the very growth they deride.
Sensing defection, members unconsciously hold you in the protective-reductive fold Lobbing embedded zingers that scold
keeping you
Wrapped in a time warp
Straightjacketed by historical lore like cellophane, transparently preserving what would otherwise naturally expire with time being divided by been
Reductive remarks have an especially long shelf life
the trance of family anesthetics Impedes seeing progression, Those myriad spaces and places where expansion landed, in bits and pieces over time, lodging themselves in the fabric of your becoming
unbeknownst to your familiars
Family bombs are invisible impediments to the present, A catnap with claws a who-do-you-think-you-are-besides-who-you-once-were
decree
that skews valuable inquiry making it easy to hate loved ones for overlooking and underseeing you
Though we can’t eject someone from the past, we can nourish our Presence with a curative additive* by asking
Who are you… today?*
This day of all days
The end of a past that marks beginning toward the morrow
What can be gained from the family refrain?
Understanding that longing to belong we sometimes accept being wronged forgoing what’s right with us
There’s a reason the hero trades home for the unknown when embarking on a journey.
Unknown is where our essence is sown