Nothing pushes our buttons like family.  No matter where we have landed in our life after childhood, there is something about being back in the family context to remind us who we are.  Oldest child, youngest child – no matter what role you hold in your professional and personal life as an adult – when you get back to the old family hearth, you will be reminded who you are, in a most direct way!

I say this, because no matter how old I get, now well into the zone of ‘the third age’,  with my siblings, I will always be ‘little sister’.  As I’ve aged and progressed through life, I’ve occupied all sorts of roles.  Some temporary, some permanent. Wife, mother, carer, friend, committee member, and so on.  But now, getting older along with my siblings, who, like me, have passed through the earlier stages in life; at the grandparent age, rather than the parent age – we now come to terms again with where we stand in the family.

“We buried our parents long ago.

We’re all retired, not working, or of pensionable age. Who is going to drop off the perch first?  Who is going to look after the singletons, the survivors of divorce or widowhood? What does ‘family’ mean to us?

We would probably all agree that we were not, in earlier years, a close family.  Our family background when growing up was shattered, divisive.  After the death of our mother, 20 years after our father’s demise, we saw even less of each other than before.

I believe that all of my siblings would agree with the description “not close”, and yet, as all five of us traverse the 7th and 8th decades of our lives, I ask the question, “Not close as compared to WHAT?”

What is the ideal family?  At this point in history, this is probably one of the most problematical questions of all!  In a world of marriage equality, predominantly single-parent or blended families, the image of the stereotypical ideal family becomes more and more blurred.

After years and years of accepting the ‘not very close’ classification in my own family, I recently experienced something of an epiphany about this, around the celebration of my eldest brother’s latest significant birthday.

And the epiphany was this:  that our family, specifically me and my siblings and our extended family, is, actually pretty good!  “How so?” I hear you ask?  Well, for one thing, despite everything – the disagreements, the lack of  regular contact, the little snafus, and the lack of hugs and ‘I love you’s’, we are actually very supportive of each other.  There is not one of my big brothers who would not be the ‘knight in shining armour’ to help out me or my sister or any family member in some way, if it were within their means.  My brothers still occasionally make jokes at my expense (which I still don’t get), but when asked, will offer help without criticism or recrimination.  Same for my sister: a rare falling out is not the end of the story – forgiveness comes without analysis or recrimination.  We are incredibly lucky, I believe, that with our background, the five of us are, at this point in time, alive AND resolved with each other!

And, for another thing, the offspring we have produced, are pretty amazing – they have inherited the better part of us, and added to that with their own life experience!

For me, this is the second most important part of my personal measure of success in my  life, my foremost measure is being in harmony with my children.  My family has the greatest power to make or break me, everything else is inferior to this.  So, as it stands, I feel that I am blessed.

Being blood family is NOT a guarantee of any sort of connection.  Sometimes family members just do NOT get on – even parents and children.  Sometimes it can be better, though not without pain, to simply sever connection.  I have seen this happen many times in my life, in my own and other families.  It can happen with or WITHOUT explanation.  This is hard, but it has to be endured.  If not, other family connections can suffer.

Having seen all this, this is how I can be thankful for the status quo of my own closest family, imperfect as it may be, today!  I love them all and am fiercely proud of them all, no matter how mad they may make me, and how mad they seem, at times – I’m sure I do the same to them!