Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Perspective

I'm the only daughter in my family, flanked by two brothers. We're all grown, but growing up together we didn't have a whole lot to do with each other. We are all very different people. My older brother went military, is very athletic and aggressive in ways my younger brother and I are not. My younger brother is a dreamer, only has his feet on the ground part of the time, and is very laid back compared to my older brother and I. Me? I'm the one who strives to do things right, to understand things, to control my world through knowledge. About the only thing we have in common is our love and tolerance for our parents and their crazy ways.

For the first time in four years, we were all together. Not since my grandfather died have we all been in the same place. And Saturday night, after walking around the desert museum, we came home, and started talking. Reliving our pasts, if you will, and connecting as grown ups in a way I haven't done before. Not as a family, that is. I've made my peace with both my brothers and parents individually, but never as a group.

And it was really eye-opening, seeing your childhood or key moments through another's perspective. Things that happened around me that I thought I understood were different. I had a relatively uneventful childhood, things only getting stirred when I got involved in the drama of my relatives and siblings. But to see it now as an adult who can't be hurt by it was really something. I'm not sure what I'd call it. Revelatory, I guess.

And I wanted to write about it here because it is one of those experiences I think that will prove to have changed me. I feel it profoundly now, the connection of family. In the past I always longed for it to be more than what it was, but that's not something I'll have with my siblings, my parents. I can create that, someday, but this bond has been cemented, not in the what might have beens, but in the what was and what is.

Still, I do wish I saw them more, if only for the hugs. We're a tactile family, and I sometimes feel starved of human contact, despite being surrounded by people.

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