kiya

So a lot of people have been writing a lot lately about family strctures, this red family/blue family thing, Government As Strict Father vs. Government As Nurturant Parent (which still gives me WTF on 'give your heka some euphony, people, rather than sounding like you barely condescend to come down out of your ivory tower' principles), negotiated commitment and inherited obligation and ...

... it's not that simple.

I need to write about my family background.

I don't know much about my paternal grandmother's family, what their sort of presumptions about the way things go were. I don't know much about this because my grandmother found them abusive or intolerable or something and walked out on them, at the age of fourteen, in the height of the Depression. She basically declared herself independent, as I understand it, contextless, unobligated and undependent, and went out and did what she had to do to survive. Which included making a jump of several social classes -- perhaps driven to meet the challenge of her given name, which was Pat.

I also don't know much about my paternal grandfather's family, because he died when my father was, I think, twelve. I know that side of the family is lower-upper class in background -- the family school is Williams, my grandfather had a vast collection of shoes, my brother inherited his top hat, tails, and silver-headed cane. "Impoverished gentry", I describe that side of the family.

I know my grandmother loved my grandfather dearly, and was utterly devastated by his death. (I believe it was complications from Crohn's/celiac disorder that killed him, from my brother's extremely agitated rendition of the story, the details of which I did not previously know. It was not a peaceful or pretty passing in any way.) My father was put into a caretaking role, in part because he was the Man Of The Household now, in part because he is a very nurturing person in general. He taught me a great deal about the nature of family and devotion by his example through my childhood.

In my mother's side of the family, I know that my grandfather had a scholarship and the opportunity to be the first person in the family to make it to college -- and went to work instead because his family needed the support. My grandfather was not the patriarch of the family; he had several older brothers, and the oldest son was the clear patriarch of the clan. I remember him as an easygoing, whimsical, and loving man; I also know that this was in part because he was a recovering alcoholic who was trying to make amends for his past. I do not believe he ever forgave himself, but I believe him to have been a good man.

My grandmother I never knew when she was herself; Alzheimer's took her self away starting about when I was old enough to have memories. I know she sought, with great vehemence, to be American, to not be seen as a Pole. I only picked up a word or two of Polish in my childhood; my mother says she knew more but has forgotten it. She did not use her given name -- Jadwiga -- because it was too obviously, too vehemently Slavic; she went by Jay. I am told she was terrifying when she was herself, strict and harsh and ostile to my mother in particular. My first memory of her is of her sewing a new tail for Ebeneezer, my beanbag zebra, when she had pulled out the old one trying to take him away from me. The yarn she used was dark, dark blue, rather than black.

In the negotiated commitment/inherited obligation paradigm, I perceive my mother's family as being strongly IO and my father's as being mixed. My conflicts with my mother's family have, in their roots, the fact that I grew up well away from their locus, and thus was not raised in a context where I absorbed that family's particular ruleset. I knew there were Obligations upon me, but not what they were. My brother gets along with them much better, but he's several orders of magnitude more socially smooth than I am. (My father looks at him and reflects, "It clearly skips generations" and also "If men in tailcoats still ruled the world ...")

I can't really characterise my childhood in terms of one or another. There were obligations; some of them were not well-rooted in my context, so I knew myself as a failure in regards to them. There were also negotiations and expectations of commitments and a whole intricate complex of other things. I can only describe the mish-mash I came out with, in no particular order:

- I do not have automatic deference to age, nor do I automatically dismiss people on the basis of youth. (One bitterly shouted comment from an argument: "Your father talks to you as if you were an adult.") All people, no matter what the age, deserve a basic level of respect which some might consider deference: the expectation that their concerns are relevant to them and ought be taken, at some level, seriously. I was treated with respect as a child, as someone who was capable of constructing thoughts and systems even if my basis for understanding was limited by my knowledge and experience; this is the minimum standard I expect of myself for dealing with all people, even if I fail at it on occasion.

- Familial relationships convey obligation. This obligation weighs more heavily on parents than children (as parents are both more capable of bearing obligation, and chose to undertake it -- I do know, distantly, someone who appears to be resentful that his consent was not asked for his birth) and more in closer blood relationships than more distant ones. Those obligations can be shored up with additional closeness and pursuit of additional specific relationships or diluted by distance, independence, and similar matters, but they do not cease.

- Extended communities (which may be kin-groups, but more often in my experience not) are part of the network of obligations. If there are children in the neighborhood, one is responsible for some concern for their well-being by simple fact of living there. Elders who invest particular care in neighborhood children are grandparents as much as bloodkin are. Those who are not engaged in the social system of the neighborhood exist primarily as landmarks, not as people.

- People who are broken, stressed, damaged, or otherwise in pain are likely to externalise their obligations -- expecting others to manage their self-care, meet their responsibilities to others, or otherwise meet their needs (whether personal or systemic). This is to be expected, and part of the weight of a network of community; however, it is something to be fixed, not enabled.

- Marriage is important. It is a fundamental human thing, this concept of forming family units. Marriage is a declaration of intent to remain in the relationship, conveys a broad and extensive set of mutual obligations, establishes status as a family, includes within it a commitment to children (whether those are biological or metaphorical) in a heavily involved and supportive sense, and, most importantly, treats the relationship as a thing of community status rather than private and personal status. All of those things can be done without marriage; only marriage grants the reflection of the community. This can be beneficial or it can be harmful, depending on the context, the community, and the marriage itself. (All of which reminds me of my father's gedankenexperiment, the one where he said, "Okay, some people treat relationship between mankind and God as a metaphorical marriage, and determine how to approach God by that metaphor. What, though, does the way people are supposed to approach the divine say about what marriage means to us?")

- Relationships that one has chosen to maintain, work on, develop, and otherwise promote will be stronger than those which are left on their own. Obligations without dedication produce bafflement at best, which can rapidly degenerate into festering resentment.

- Certain types of petition for aid are better directed along bloodkin lines than chosen relationships (such as borrowing significant amounts of money) because that sort of aid is a natural part of the relationship between parent and child, but a stress on a negotiated commitment.

- One of the essential obligations of a chosen family bond (obligations of a parent or a spouse, in other word) is nurturing care. Choosing to embark on such a relationship means a permanent (or nearly so) obligation to the well-being of the other. In the case of a child, it is an obligation taken on before one knows who one is devoted to, which means it is a matter of tremendous weight.

- Dissolving commitments is a matter of last resort, and is only acceptable if it is a matter of otherwise unresolvable choice between irreconcilable obligations.

- If a commitment must be dissolved, it is better to do so in the same community in which the commitment was established, with the same witnessing and assent.

- There are obligations of time and energy investment in family -- care for others, attendance at family gatherings and significant other things -- but I cannot articulate what they are.

- Just because someone has done harm to one in a family context does not mean that they can be treated with less care and consideration, but it does freely limit what negotiated commitments one may undertake above and beyond the obligated ones. Thus, one may well not go out of one's way to express care and concern for that person, while still meeting the basic obligations of time of need and acknowledgements of kinship.

- It is possible to break entirely with one's kin (and by extension, other sorts of commitments/obligations), but this is an irrevocable decision with repercussions. In the long run, this can end obligation between parties, but getting there is hard.

- The value of a community as a whole is primarily related to the minimum standards of living, happiness, and care to which its members will be raised. A large community such as a nation can only realistically address the most basic needs, primarily material ones, because higher standards of existence depend on personal knowledge and investment. At the same time, a smaller, more intimate group will have fewer resources to devote to the individual needs of its members. Somewhere in here, there's a fiddly balance to be struck.

- Embarking on a relationship conveys the obligation to behave in a manner that is conducive to the good health of a relationship of that type. Sometimes this will be easy, natural, and straightforward; sometimes it will not. That it is difficult does not change the obligation to behave appropriately.

- Wanting a relationship of a certain sort with someone does not convey an obligation on them to provide anything beyond the basic obligations of shared being-peopleness. (Or kinship, if that exists. Or whatever other specific relationships exist.)

The thing I had to learn as an adult:

- There are obligations to self. Further, maintaining oneself in good condition makes one better able to actually meet commitments and obligations in general. Blowing off this obligation is not merely a failure to meet an obligation, but an underhanded way of depriving the system of my resources.


There's probably more, but that's my sort of negotiated-obligation model, as best as I can render it at the moment.