We get the family that we do

for a reason...then what is the point of mine?

I read the above on a student’s multimodal Intellectual Elders project today. She then went on to describe the lengths in which her parents went to in order to be solid figures in her life: to form her faith and morals, provide support, and very carefully to help her address her dyslexia.

She summed it up that—God either gives us a family to aspire to be like or to one not be like.

Now…

I am happy for her, truly, I never want anyone to be without solid parents and a functional family.

But.

Again, I think it’s incredibly easy for people to say such matters when they have had the easy road.

I remember hearing something similar a few years ago. Someone had mentioned that we choose the mother we will have before birth in the beyond.

I found that a puzzling concept.

I mentioned to my mother who immediately retorted:

“Well, I don’t know why I would have chosen Grandma Bishop!”

Fair point, the mother abandoned her at 13 and when her children were brought back to her by my mother’s grandfather said,

“Take them out of here. I don’t want them.”

Hence her journey into foster care and pseudo-relatives who didn’t want her.

Given my mother’s trauma, I could see why I would have chosen her, especially with the wonderfully nurturing mother that she was to me, despite her life circumstances.

Now, other than that, and I don’t intend for the rest to be a ‘woe is me’—but a matter of philosophical inquiry:

Because, really…why mine ?!?!?

Why did I end up with this family with such multi-leveled dysfunction and intergenerational trauma and emotional inheritance (on both sides!) that I still continue to learn new things about each time I get together with other family members?

What comes to mind is that ridiculous platitude:

“I know that God won’t give me more than I can handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.”

True ‘dat.

I’ve written before that this whole God won’t give me more than I can handle is a load of crap to me—not because I don’t believe in God, I certainly do and strongly—but because, considering the two suicides, I can’t believe that.

I just can’t believe that.

To do so, somehow seems to dishonor the memory of my father and brother. And while I had tremendously strained relationships with the both of them, in this way, I am defensive of them.

I can’t acquiesce to that nonsense.

Similarly, I think of two of my closest friends who would have made the most amazing mothers but who had infertility issues. I can understand their frustrations with how/why mothers who don’t want their children—like Grandma Bishop—or all the others who abuse and neglect their kiddos, are still allowed to reproduce.

Life is not always fair. There is an awful lot of crap. And for some, it seems much much heavier of a shitstorm than for others.

I appreciate my students’ gratitude. It is good that she knows that she is blessed.

But there is so much that still doesn’t make sense to me about my family and why, just why, I got them.

Sometimes I think that if I had children then I could better understand why I was [meant to be] on this path because then I would be charged with the task of working to heal the intergenerational trauma for the benefit of my own children.

But, I’m not.

I do think I am meant to become a more functional and healthy person for my own right and the benefit of my friends and students.

Still—

I will be quite honest with you.

Sometimes that still comes up flimsy to me.

The only—and truly, the only-fucking-thing that I can come up with is this:

It is the very reason that I started writing this newsletter:

If there is ever anyone else who ends up a parallel journey to my own, with two members in their immediate family who have completed suicide, maybe a parent and a sibling, I want them to know this:

There is someone else out there, who survived and is working to journey through and heal through that tremendous hardship.

With suicides dramatically on the rise, and mental health concerns more of a pressing issue in this country than ever before, it is a definite possibility.

I just want that one hypothetical desperate soul (who I hope never exists) to—in a moment of utter desperation, when they go googling, to know that they are not alone.

I have to tell you—when you are feeling like you are even the freak among the suicide support group, because you have two in the immediate family and the other members of the suicide support group meeting are gaping at you—it can weigh on you.

But knowing that someone else is out there and is willing to be visible and to talk about it. And that they are still here, fighting to live a healthy life despite complex grief and trauma and PTSD—

It may be a lifeline to them.

Grief and suicide books and stories were lifelines to me.

Again, I would not wish my situation on the person I loathed the most in this world, but—

As I’ve written before, shared stories of humanity are tonics; they are balm; they are therapeutic and cathartic, they can make the difference between life and death.

I’m not being hyperbolic. I am dead serious. (Emphasis on the dead.)

Stories—if that’s all that we really are (so says elder Thomas King), which I believe wholeheartedly, then stories equal our survival.