Pick and Choose

I've had a chance to spend some time recently thinking about relationships...particularly familial relationships... and I've come to the following conclusion:

They are complicated.

Over my desk hangs a snapshot taken at my stepdaughter's wedding. In it is the bride (her), her father and my daughter (her half sister). That is where the blood ends.

The picture also includes my niece, two nephews, my mother, my sister, and my brother-in-law. Oh, and me.

Generally speaking I like this picture. It oddly contains some aspect of each person's personality. My youngest nephew is distracted by something his sister is holding. His sister is focused and wearing her Mona Lisa smile. My daughter is smiling and her eyes are dancing at something the photographer was saying. My ex-husband is wearing the exact same smile he has for every picture.

My sister is smirking. She smirks frequently because, I think, inside her head is this constant Robin William-like chatter. It's even funnier when it exits her mouth. My brother-in-law is a stoic kind of guy and yet he has a pleased look on his face. It's the look that has always anchored my fondness for him. You have to know him to be able to see it and I'm still not sure that everyone in our family has figured that out.

Next to me my mother is grinning her usual grin - it's the one she uses for pictures and moments when she has to smile becauses she is "bucking up." I'm not suggesting she wasn't happy...I think she was...but the tedium of post ceremony pictures gets to everyone. Behind me my eldest nephew is towering over most of us and it is in this picture that I am reminded that the bare-butt baby I helped deliver into this world has grown into a handsome young adult.

And yet...it feels incomplete.

I look relaxed in this picture as I tilt my head in toward my mother and I actually like this picture of me because it doesn't show just how fat I am (vanity thy name is woman.) But if you know me, if you really know me, that smile is the one I give when I am seething and trying to be a good sport. It is a perfect blend of my mother and my father.

Missing from the picture is my heart. He is standing out of the picture looking on. It never occurred to him to be part of the picture - but it occurred to me. The look on my face is the look of a woman honoring a bride's wishes made clear just moments before and trying to be a good sport about it.

It is only just now that I realize why this picture and that scene make me so angry.

With two exceptions, every person in that picture is the brides family because of me and only because of me. Not an ounce of shared blood flows through her veins. She hangs on to the family I brought into her world with a tenacity reminiscient of Molly Brown and the Titanic. But not my WHOLE family. Only the part she picks and chooses.

Also missing from this picture because they could not attend are my father, 2 brothers, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, my 5 other nephews and other niece. Had they been there she would have wanted them in the picture and those 10 other people would have spread around her in love. But still she would not have wanted Chris.

But Chris is as much my family as she is. In fact more so.

It is Chris that wakes up with me every morning, worries about whether I've had lunch (or dinner), holds me when I sad, sits quietly with me when I am watching a waterfall, thinks outloud with me when I'm am noodling through a "situation", patiently explains football to me every weekend and laughs at me when I yell at the football refs, players, and coaches. He is not me but he amplifies everything I find good in who I am (and sometimes the stuff that isn't so good.)

My sister wisely suggested that perhaps she did not want Chris in the picture because to her he represents the fact that her father and I are no longer together. That may be true. But my family is as much to blame for that as I am, and certainly more to blame for it than Chris is. It was my family who raised me with enough self-esteem and strength that when I finally realized that we were NOT good for each other I was able to leave him.


So it left the question wide open. How much of your family can you choose?

With that first divorce in my family came a question in our ranks - was my ex-husband (and his children) still part of our family. We pondered deeply for about 3 seconds and then came to the conclusion that yes, they were.

And it was this decision made without hesitation that serves as the backdrop for why my step-daughter's exclusionary behavior bothers me so much. Does she have the right to pick and choose?

After much thought I've decided that while she can choose her family, she can't choose mine. Mine is wide and open and loving even in our every annoyance with each other. Entrance into my family is a gift that seemingly never ends as my divorce from her father (and therefore her) did not alter my family's decision to let them keep their places. Maybe it's the fact that a big family realizes that a new kid does not spread the love any thinner.

At the end of the day I think what I've learned is that I *can't* pick and choose parts of my family. If you're in, you're in. But I think I learned that the moment my parents brought home my first sibling.

So if the piece that glues you to my family is *me* then you get ALL of my family - Chris included.

If you can't deal with that...then it's time to get out.

NL