Archive for December 16th, 2011
Celebrating my friend, who is my family
My 3yo is going through a phase. He is defiant, quick to anger, often exasperated and exasperating. This has been a struggle for my partner and I for a few months now. I wrote one of my best friends about this recently and today she wrote me an email that took my breath away and touched my heart. I’m not going to share all of it but I want to share one part where she discusses the silver lining of my son’s defiance:
I have to say, if I could (every once in a while) tell my authority figures to fuck off (by my behavior or whatever) and was so secure, knowing they would continue to love me and take care of me…. Well I might spend whole days telling them to fuck off.
Both she and I grew up in families that were built on conditional love. How much of it is perceived to be conditional versus actually being conditional, at least in my case, is hard to know – I was always too terrified of it being conditional to test it (and when I did test it, I retreated quickly back to the safe path).
These words my friend wrote me, this idea of my own child existing in a familial space where he doesn’t feel the love and comfort we show him/tell him as a condition of correct behavior is just…breathtaking.
Sometimes I literally do not know what I would do without my friends. My partner and I talk often about our decision to only have one child and what that will mean when our child is grown and we are gone. What will he do for family then?
When my friends send me emails like my friend did today, I am reminded that as we grow older, our friends are the families we choose for ourselves. And if my partner and I do this parenting thing at all correctly, hopefully our son will not have a problem finding his own family of friends to care for him, love him, hold his hand, hug him, comfort him, right him when he is on the wrong path, give him advice, and see him through life the way my friends do for me.
I happen to have a sister whom I adore and, despite whatever flaws exist in my family, I love them thoroughly and with my entire heart.
But today I want to celebrate the amazing thing that is a good, true, chosen, loving friend.
