I love my family and all of its sometimes wobbly parts. Parents separate. Kids go through rough patches. Someone emerges from a painful childhood into a blooming, glorious adult. A kind word is spoken in private, touching the heart of a lonely member, letting her know that she belongs and is cherished when she, herself, cannot feel that belonging.
I am married to my third husband so I’ve had lots of practice being part of biological and other kinds of families. I’ve had my current husband’s ex-wife for Thanksgiving dinner more times than I can count. My third husband and I have been to my first husband’s house for Christmas gift opening (only once as his second wife put a stop to that fancy idea). I have had two sets of step-children, the first, two teenaged boys who didn’t want any part of me, and the second, my forty and fifty year old step-children (they refer to me as their father’s wife) with whom I have an increasingly close relationship. I have three wonderful adult daughters.
Reading Jane Brody’s latest Well column in the New York Times (Dec. 8, 2020) titled “The Lasting Damage of a Fractured Family,” would have been a column I’d skipped until recent changes in my family. As I’ve said, I’ve had lots of practice getting along in different kinds of families, and although I’ve certainly been through some tough emotional times with one or another of my family members, I’ve believed myself to be competent at confronting and resolving difficult issues.
Brody sites Karl Pillemer, a Cornell University sociologist, from his book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them, as a source of knowledge and empathy. Pillemer interviewed adults and children who had been through times of unresolved rifts — children who never knew their grandparents because of their parents’ rifts with their own parents, a beloved aunt who raised a child only to reject her when the child became an adult and married outside of her family’s religion. Adult children say cutting things to their own parents. The parents say cutting things to their children who are now raising children of their own.
I know many of these scenarios, if not first hand, then, at least through conversations with my friends and family. Yet, I’ve walked blindly into what seems to me to be an unresolvable conflict with my youngest child. Let me hasten to say that I don’t think she would characterize our relationship in this way. When I talk with her by phone, she says she loves me. She almost never gets angry with me. I’m the one in crisis, and I feel sad and guilty about it.
My daughter believes fervently in the stories Donald Trump and his supporters have told about conspiracies, Democratic dirty tricks, and Bill Gates having knowingly inoculated 25,000 of India’s children with a faulty vaccine. At first I took her instructive conversations as one of many passions that would blow over. This has happened in the past. But after almost a year of listening, being told I wasn’t doing my research, or coming to the end of my patience with “facts” I found fantastical, I have told her I will not be stopping by to see her at Christmas. It might be dangerous under the best of relational circumstances to fly to Minneapolis from San Francisco this December. I am 77. I’m on the hit list for the virus. But in truth, that is not why I won’t go. I won’t go because I cannot envision my willingness to sit in her tiny apartment and listen to this talk for two days.
She has told me in our last conversation that she doesn’t think I should come if I feel that the circumstances of my coming put me in danger. That’s my story, but not the whole one. I want to bridge this divide, but I don’t know how. I can, and have, asked her not to talk about her beliefs, but about what she is doing (living on unemployment), and what she wants for her future (teaching English online), where she wants to live (Merida, Mexico in a planned community with other young Americans), and how she plans to make that wish come true (she has a van and plans to outfit it to live in). These are conversations that are, obviously, easier for me.
She’s told me that she has lost several friends this past year. That might be true for all of us given the reduced ability to be with our friends. In her case, though, it is because of her fervent beliefs in Trump’s and his followers’ accusations and theories. One of her most loyal friends told her (according to my daughter) that he cannot be with her and listen to her without defending his own beliefs that run counter to hers. They could not resolve their differences sufficiently for them to remain friends.
In many ways my youngest child was the delight of my single life (after I left her father). She wanted to live with me. We were very close — too close according to her young adult self. She is now very close to her father and I’m grateful for that, at least. She sees him and they talk frequently. He lives in the same city as she does. I’m glad there is somebody to watch over her. I’m glad she can talk about her beliefs with him. According to my other daughters, he is a Trump supporter but not a nut case. You can make of that anything you like.
