Home for the Holidays

This time of year has turned me quiet and confused as usual, remembering connections to people who are no longer with me, and maneuvering through the web of connections that do still exist, new and old, trying to find my place. I was having tea with a friend the other day and she said to me something like, “You are family, you know.” Oh no. It’s…the f-word. The word that feels so cozy, like we know it. Of course it feels that way; after all, it lives in the word “familiar”, just as we’ve all lived in our sense of family all our lives. But what the hell is it?

When I was little what I remember about family holidays was a complicated dance through the homes of extended family with multiple turkey dinners. My family was full of odd branches where divorce had happened; instead of cutting off the limb, it had sent off shoots to grow larger and stranger, in funny unexpected directions. My hometown was full of cousins of all flavors, along with the more garden variety relatives, and somehow we had to spend time with everyone. I never thought it was strange; it was just how holidays and families were. As I got a little older and my own personal connections became more important to me, I began to have more of an opinion about how I wanted to spend these times. I particularly remember being around 11 or 12 years old: I had a huge crush on a boy at church and our family had been invited to a party at his parents’ house on the same day we were obligated to go to one set of great grandparents with that particular branch of relatives. One young cousin had received a science kit complete with dissectible frog that day. I can still feel the ambivalence of wanting so badly to be somewhere else, with someone else, that I could barely stay put inside my skin, and at the same time feeling the pleasure of taking my cousin on a tour through the frog, her wonder of discovery and my satisfaction in teaching her.

At those times, I have such a strong sense of these skin and bones as holding in something else, something other. I am a container and what I hold is large and mysterious, terrifying sometimes and not always pretty but worth exploring.

Later at college and into my adult life, things became simpler. I lived far away from family so I made a family of friends. I was glad to leave behind the complications of kin. My friends and I celebrated together and each group of friends felt like a group that would stay connected forever. Until each one stopped being connected.

Then I met my partner. Her family lived close but they didn’t speak to us. My family was still far away so everything was simple again. My partner and I were family, and for holidays we invited stray friends home for dinner.

Later still I met another woman and with her we became a family of three, venturing into a whole new territory with the belief that love is big enough to hold more than two. When I used the word family with her though she reacted like an animal in a trap, panicked, hostile, trying to chew her leg off to get free. I was offended at the time, but I have a certain sympathy with her now after a few more years of experiencing polyamory and the complications it brings to family ties.

This Thanksgiving my partner and I celebrated alone, enjoying the luxury of time together, cooking and eating and watching movies and just being together. But I also felt an echo of that ambivalence that I first felt so many years ago. My chosen family is larger now and local, so where are the complications I remember from my childhood of the multiple homes with the multiple turkeys? Trying to fit in everyone and finding the compromise that doesn’t quite work? Family it seems to me is partly about that feeling that grows out of obligation, that feeling of being here because I have to, even if I don’t really want to, teaching the young cousin when I want to be off flirting.

At the same time, being the obligation is uncomfortable. The young cousin had no sense of herself as obligation because I was family; therefore, I was there with her. She wasn’t aware of being chosen. But in friendship and with polyamory, we do choose, and we know we are choosing and being chosen. And we want to keep being chosen. I don’t want you here because you have to be here; I want to know that you want to be here. And I’m terrified that you might stop wanting to be here. There comes a time in a relationship where I become the frog on the tray. Peel my skin away and what will you find? Will you see only the complicated workings, throw your hands up in dismay at ever trying to figure it all out and walk away? After all, I don’t have to look far to see someone easier, fresher, sexier than I am. Or will you feel that wonder of discovery that holds you even though it’s complicated, and maybe not always much fun? Why are you choosing me? And will you keep choosing me? Family, I think, might have something to do with that choice.

Here we are in family holiday season and I am approaching a surgery. Not a major surgery, but my first since I was 12. My mother has offered to fly out to be with me, but I have chosen to have my family of partners and friends with me. And I am scared. Is that web of connections a safety net or a trap? If I make use of it will it change everything? My temptation when I feel unsure is to make myself small, cut all the ties and drop away.

I wrote a piece for a class where I used the phrase, “…I needed to feel admirable.” A woman in class asked if what I really meant was, “…I needed to feel admired.” I love being admired, but the truth is that what I always want to know is whether I am worthy of admiration, worthy of being loved. I am loved, I have been loved, I will be loved. I am comfortable with that conjugation of the verb and I feel the truth of it. Those are the strings of my web. I wish I could say that I am always so secure in myself that while I am being loved I also know I am worthy of it, but the truth is I need reassurance to tell me that it is okay for me to be there, in that web, to pull the threads when I need help and know that I’m not strangling someone’s freedom, to feel comfortable letting the thread go and know that the attachment is still there even as it’s reeling away from me, to know that I am allowed to be loved even when I am prickly and complicated and exposed. To know that I can accept love and care from this chosen family, even if they have mixed feelings about the obligation, because there is something of worth they can receive only from me. To know that they will be there for me, that I can trust the web of love to hold me safe.

copyright 2008 J. Autumn Needles