In addition to getting me to write more, and more often, part of the NaBloPoMo odyssey has been about getting me to reconnect with the people I consider to be “my community” which, in turn, has gotten me to thinking a lot about the meanings of words like community and family.
I’ve been reconsidering my Blogroll (down there, on the right, that list of blogs that I think worthy or important enough to link to). I started out using the blogroll for a couple of reasons: 1) it was an easy way to keep track of the little corners of the blogsphere that I think are worth visiting that might not make it to Technorati’s most popular list) and 2) it was convenient; I never had to remember where I could just go one place (clearly this was in the days before del.icio.us).
It started out as a way for me to keep track of things for my own sake but then I realized that other people were linking to me so I added them to my blogroll.
And while the blogroll does help me keep up with what is doing in my little ad hoc community including:
- Jim being ahead of his word count on NaNoWriMo this year (go Jim! go Jim!);
- S. doing a week long meditation retreat;
- QCTester making me wonder why they don’t all weigh 400lbs over there;
- Ella going back to school; and
- STB being all giddy and hopeful about the Dems taking over Congress
it also makes me question what my commitment is to this community, and just how in the larger scheme of things we define community and family.
I’ve got a couple of blogs in my blogroll that are simply just dead; indeed, one hasn’t updated for over a year. I’ve got a couple that I thought were dead but have suddenly sprung back to life, one of those through the graces of blogger’s inability to actually run servers during an election. So what is my obligation to those blogs that have been abandoned or in which I have lost interest or grown past what their authors have to say? Do I link to them simply because they still link to me? That seems too transactional a view of the relationship, as sketchy as it may be, to suit me, yet where in a relationship does it stop being a relationship and start being an obligation?
My family is readjusting the holidays this year. After 16 years of Thanksgiving dinners at my aunt’s house – instituted because that first year after my grandmother died no one could face the idea of dinner up the street from the dark, empty, as-yet-unsold house – both my mother and I finally drew the line and said “I’d rather just stay home.” As a group we’ve also finally admitted that the typical family Christmas practiced for decades (and marketed to you heavily by Hallmark) where we get together in a loud, noisy bunch, open well-suited presents and then have a sumptuous meal has degenerated into obligatory giving of items that are given just so everyone has the same number of boxes under the tree. Not only has it become awkward, it’s also a gigantic waste of money. Christmas, then, will become gifts to the immediate family and dinner with the larger group. This is, I think, a good thing.
The impending holidays and some other recent and not so recent events have caused me to take a really, really hard look at how we define family. In America family has a huge number of shifting, socially acceptable definitions.
Somewhere between the turn of the 20th century and the end of World War II family went from meaning the big, sprawling, multigenerational model we’re all oh so familiar with from every movie about immigrants that has ever been made (see The Godfather and Avalon for Italian-American models) to family meaning Mom, Dad, and two kids (witness the small screen exemplars: Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best). The reality is, family is more complex than that.
One of my coworkers lives in a near suburb that has always been a haven for crunchy, hippie types. Her sprawling extended family includes several other single parents, both moms and dads, and functions the way any “normal” family would: they do chores together, they go to Home Depot on the weekends, they have friends over to view Lost, except they all live in their own houses with their own kids on the same block. If they consider themselves a family, what makes them any less of a family because they don’t meet someone else’s definiton?
And definition is really the issue. I used to think that family was about blood; that blood relations were dependable, strong, and could always be relied upon in times of need. As I have reluctantly absorbed this year, this sadly is not always the case.
Gay and lesbian people throw the word family around as both a code (“oh, him, he’s family definitely”) but it also has a larger meaning in a community where your actual, blood family is almost as likely to erase you from the family bible as they are to accept you for who you are. It works off the concept that family can be chosen, formed from the ether by a group of similar souls lucky to find each other.
So, if family isn’t always defined by blood and can be defined by chosen committment, how, exactly, did with end up with the non-existent nuclear family as the model, particularly in a day and age where people are divorcing, remarrying, adopting, and otherwise incorporating people into their families that, well, just don’t fit?
Who decided these things? You can’t tell me it’s about the biological imperative and procreation; marriage and monogamy (theoretically they go hand in hand) are, in fact, counter-intuitive to furthering the continuation of the species.
I’m questioning a lot of “shoulds” these days, a lot of the old standards. But no matter what standard it is that I question it still boils down to the same basic thing: Who is deciding these things and how to we get the power to make those decisions for ourselves back from them?
