Untied

“Hello?”

“I’m so glad you picked up, did you get my messages? You’ve been so difficult to reach lately.”

“So?”

“So, we were wondering if we’ll be seeing you guys at Thanksgiving this year?”

“Not after you disinvited us last year.”

“Disinvited?”

“You disinvited us at the last minute.”

“Disinvited? Oh, I remember, your kids were sick, really sick, right? Throwing up and stuff.”

“It was Thanksgiving. We had nowhere else to go. No one to watch the kids. So we stayed home with them and stared at the wall.”

“But your kids were really sick, I mean, didn’t they need the rest? And I’m surprised you even thought of bringing them and their germs into a house crammed full of kids, infecting them and all that. We had to think of the other kids, and the adults. No one gives thanks for the flu, you know.”

“Last year you really screwed it up for us. We had nowhere to go after you disinvited us at the last minute. You ruined our holiday. We’re not going to let that happen again. We’re not relying on you again. This year, we’re doing it at our house.”

“Your house?”

“Yes. We’ve invited everyone to our house.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone on our side. I suppose you can come too, if you want.”

“Thanks, but we still plan to have dinner here.”

“Fine, suit yourself. Get a smaller turkey.”

Click.

I imagine a family is like a solar system, with elders in the middle and aunts and uncles and cousins and children and grandchildren orbiting around, some close in like Mars, others far out like Neptune, but all rotating together in some kind of cosmic harmony. Examined up close, an individual appears independent, but when you step back you detect the invisible forces that bind the individual to the family core, keeping the individual from spinning away into space.

Then there’s my family, the one I grew up with.

It would be convenient metaphorically to say a supernova blew us apart, but that’s not how it happened. It wasn't a bang, just a whimper. Over the decades a succession of small and smaller events chipped away at our core until, imperceptibly, whatever gravitational pull once held us together stretched and frayed and eventually snapped, sending us spinning away so far into space we barely see each other anymore. Today our paths no longer intersect. In our center, there’s no there there, just a fading memory and a lingering but rapidly receding sense of familial duty that, these days, is barely strong enough to bring us together for major surgeries and funerals.

And though we still mourn together when a family member dies, I don’t get the sense any of us mourn the death of our family. Most of us have married, and with marriage we’ve joined new families, and any family we marry into is going to be better than the family we’ve already buried, so we’ve naturally gravitated towards our new families, happily shifting our orbits to conform to theirs.

That’s not to say everything is perfect, of course, for a lifetime of experience with a disintegrating family doesn’t really prepare one for life with an integrating family. I can’t speak for the other members of my old family, for I rarely speak to them, but I can say for my own part that I often feel like an alien with my new family, standing apart and examining them during family functions, trying the learn their ways so I can pass myself off as one of them.

I’ll probably never succeed at shedding my outsider status. It’s too deeply ingrained. And let's face it, if my wife ever dumps me, my new family will surely dump me too. But none of this really matters, for my children orbit around a strong family core and, in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?