FAMILIAL

Familial relationships are quite difficult, as they change for every family and even within families. I experience a completely different relationship with my mother than my sister experiences with my mother. This goes for all relationships, too, but I feel this way especially for families. Families are usually people that are a part of our lives, regardless of the hardships we go through, as we are supposed to go through them together. However, that is not always the case.

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An example of this is the relationship between my grandmother and my aunt. According to my mother, my aunt and grandma didn’t have the best relationship growing up. My grandma was too sensitive and my aunt was too cold-hearted. My grandma hated my aunt’s rebellious nature and my aunt hated my grandma’s constant self-pity from depression and anxiety. They just never saw eye-to-eye, making it difficult for everyone else living in that house. As soon as my grandmother and grandfather got divorced, my aunt jumped to my grandpa’s defense, hurting my grandma even more than the divorce did. Since this divorce, their relationship had been rocky. My aunt moved out of the state as soon as she graduated college and only contacts my grandma when she feels it is absolutely necessary, which isn’t very often. My grandma visits my aunt whenever she moves to a new state, as long as she doesn’t have to fly and has someone else to travel with. When my aunt is in Michigan, though, she tries to avoid my grandmother at all costs unless she is in town for an event that my sister or I have.  My aunt just got hired as the Assistant Dean of Students at a college in Texas and I have the sneaking suspicion that she hasn’t told her own mother. It’s sad, but my grandmother realizes that this is how their relationship is due to the childhood that led up to it.

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I believe that my grandmother and aunt have talked about their problems a few times, so they are able to understand where the other is coming from. My aunt is too independent and my grandmother is too dependent. They still aren’t on great terms, obviously, but having a talk or two just to clarify things has helped.

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Families are the people we have for life, but sometimes we choose to not even have that. No one deserves it, however it can be quite common. Not everyone has the same relationship with their children, whether that be family-to-family or within the family, and I think it is important to recognize those differences. There is so much pressure to have a perfect relationship with your children when that isn’t possible, as seen in the advice column above. The anonymous writer wanted advice on how to reconnect with her estranged daughter when it might not be possible to reform the perfect relationship. There is no such thing as perfect, as relationships can always improve. 

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However, the advice giver handled the answer poorly. It is really difficult to pinpoint exactly what went wrong in a familial relationship and it’s even harder to put the blame on exactly one person. It takes two people to have a relationship, whether that be good or bad. You can’t blame someone for “being cold” and you can’t blame another for being “too blunt.”

Familial relationships fall apart sometimes, as seen with my aunt and my grandmother, and both are to blame or neither are to blame. No one deserves a poor relationship with their family, but sadly it happens. The shared vocabulary, though, that coldness and bluntness are inherently bad and are the reasons for poor relationships isn’t entirely right. Just because someone is honest or a bit closed off doesn’t make them a bad person.