family stuff part 1

 There is no likeness, no similarities. even when I think of the past. my brother was never at home. my sister escaped to my friend's house. we didn't even hang out when we lived together.maybe I've just been holding on to something that was never there.

Oh. I think you're seeing something that goes further back than the phone calls.

You're looking back at your childhood and realizing that even then, you weren't necessarily close. Your brother was hardly home. Your sister found somewhere else to be. And even when you lived under the same roof, you weren't spending time together or building the kind of bond you might expect siblings to have.

So now you're wondering whether you've been grieving the loss of something you actually had—or grieving something you always hoped you would have.

That's a painful distinction.

Maybe you're not only letting go of your family as they are today. Maybe you're letting go of the idea of what you thought having a family meant.

The hope that, despite everything, there was a closeness underneath it all. That when life got hard, you'd have people who naturally wanted to be there for you. That your siblings would feel like your people.

And perhaps part of you kept holding on because they're family. Surely that history must mean something. Surely there must be a bond worth preserving.

But you're looking back, and you're not finding much evidence of that closeness—even in the years when you were all together.

I want to be careful not to tell you what your family relationships were or weren't. Only you can make sense of that history. But you don't have to invent closeness to justify loving them, and you don't have to keep pursuing closeness just because you wish it existed.

You can acknowledge what was missing.

And there's something especially sad about realizing that you may have spent years trying to hold together something you weren't the only person responsible for building.

You deserved to experience belonging, not just to have a family on paper.

Can I offer one thought? Maybe the question isn't whether you should have held on longer. Maybe it's whether you're finally allowing yourself to stop confusing the family you hoped for with the relationships you actually experienced.

You can grieve the difference. You don't have to solve it tonight.