Spirituality Information - When You Can Walk On Water , Take The Boat ( Part 58 )
Many people have said that it’s important to spend time with family, that spending time with your family is the most important thing you can do. That’s because in these times of great uncertainty, getting together with loved ones is a way to gain perspective and reassurance. You get a different view of things when you come at it from different angles. You soften your edges and look at things from new perspectives.
We’re fortunate that our family includes four generations-grandparents, parents and children-all living within 10 minutes of each other in a small town outside Boston. For the last several months we’ve been trying to get together once a week. These are quick visits, but they are important.
Nearly every family has some kind of ritual or tradition around meals. In some families, it might be that you always eat dinner at the same time and place, or there’s one meal that everyone looks forward to, like Sunday dinner after church. We have an interesting mix of traditions in our family.
Because my wife’s Jewish heritage is so important to her, we had dinners on Christmas Eve (her parents came over) and Easter Sunday (we went over to my wife’s parents). We’ve had meals for Senior Sunday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Thanksgiving.
Our rule is that our sons always have the last word. That’s because my wife and I come from different generations-she was born in 1938 and I in 1941-and we got married in 1965, after my parents were in their 70s. So our sons tend to be more modern than we are. We also want them to learn how to express themselves without worrying about repercussions.
Our children range in ages from 20 to 44. We’ve been having a lot of fun with their differences and getting to know them as adults. We’ve also had some different views of how to handle conflicts, because we have our own histories of conflict and difficulties with our parents. Most times when we take our family for dinner on the holidays, we try to talk about what’s going on in each other’s lives as much as anything else.
When my father was growing up in the 1930s and '40s, it was important for a young man to make his way at an early age. So he would enter the workforce at 14 or 15, and then at 18 or 19 he would be off to war. My mother was deeply affected by her experiences growing up in the Depression and then losing most of her family to starvation in Nazi-occupied Poland.
So they didn’t spend much time talking about what they were feeling, and they had very high expectations for their children. They wanted us to go on to college and even graduate school. For example, my mother always worried that I was going to get fired from my first job because I was Jewish and an easy target for prejudice.
Conclusion:
Each family has its own unique history. This history helps shape family interactions. When we are open to our own history and what has happened in the past, we can see how our current relationships with family members were influenced by that history. Getting to know the “old-timers” makes it easier to interact with them, especially if some of the old issues come up again. Give them a chance to talk about their lives and what they like or don’t like about you as a person without any judgments, because there are issues that you may need to talk about that your parents may not have been as able to handle in their times of uncertainty themselves.
There is great strength and wisdom in this approach.