There are nuclear families and extended families, blended families and step-families. There are definitions for each of these types and we have an image in our mind of the ideal family, but most people probably feel like their family doesn’t fit the norm.
A family is made up of a set of expected roles. When an outsider looks at a family, they expect to see siblings and parents playing the typical roles of a brother, sister, mother and father. However, there are exceptions to these expectations and families are often comprised of a complex network of relationships.
Defining people in terms of these roles is a way of simplifying the concept of a family. It’s easier in many ways to describe someone with a few words and leave it at that. How many times have you heard the phrases “the paranoid mother,” “the abusive father,” “the crazy relative,” etc? Describing someone with these labels convinces you that this is a realistic representation of who they are, and there is no need to define what your actual relationship really is with that person.
Sometimes we allow relationships with family members to fade into grayness in our minds. There may be family members who we never understand. We are unable to imagine life in their shoes, understand their dynamic nature or why they see nothing as right or wrong. But that’s OK — accepting that we will never understand everything about our families is the first step to staying sane.
I recently met my 17-year-old brother at the Pullman-Moscow Regional Airport after three years of separation. After such a long time apart in which we have grown, changed and experienced life, being together has surprisingly not been strange. Perhaps we see each other not as a brother and sister, but as a family unit. Two people who have had parallel experiences of life seen through different eyes at different ages.
When we were growing up, my brother and I were constantly moving between houses, experiencing dramatic changes in lifestyle and expectations every week or two, and dealing with the situations together. Family matters were often confusing to us, and life was filled with ups and downs. Now we are at a point where the concept of forgiveness of the past seems tied to unrealistic expectations of a family that we never had.
Few people experience the “perfect family,” so comparing our experience to that of an ideal family seems silly. But forgiveness of the past implies that someone’s upbringing was not at the same standard as this ideal, and it doesn’t seem fair to blame parents who undeniably invest so much in the lives of their families.
Psychologists often dig into past dysfunctional family relationships in order to diagnose current problems. Although this is valuable, sometimes it seems like the people we are most closely connected to are held to expectations of the norm, and therefore “fail” us. Held to the same ideals, we probably fail them.
Each member of a family is part of one another’s complex and dynamic life experiences. The norm is simply a myth, and we can only be at peace with the past when we do not expect others to fit into the roles of the “perfect” family.