I've got family on the brain.

Throughout the course of my time at Princeton, quite a few people have been confused, surprised, and possibly even appalled by the degree to which I don't really associate myself with my family. Their reactions have always just provoked a general wondering about how strange my family is, but it hasn't ever really bothered me until I realized last night that my boyfriend seems...displeased by this. My family is not really, nor to the best of my memory has it ever been, a cohesive unit of any sort. My friends are much more of a family in that regard than are the people who are related to me by blood or circumstance. "By blood or circumstance"--see, my family is comprised largely of people who I'm not actually related to by blood or marriage--people who are attached to other family members of mine by blood on the side that isn't related to me by blood. For example, there's a large group of people in Atlanta and the surrounding area that I used to be related to by marriage: my ex-stepfather (whom I abhor) and his family (they aren't all bad). I haven't seen them since I was nine, but I'm Facebook friends with some of them, and the real question here is at what point does someone stop being family? My ex-stepfather is not related to me. I like to pretend that he never was. Most of his family, I am skeptical of considering them to be my family. But his first son, who recently re-entered my life, has never and could never stop being my brother. 

Let me explain my family a little. My dad's side is the easiest because there are four of us. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. My dad was the only child of only children; my sister, my niece, and I are his only living relatives. My dad and I haven't lived in the same household since my mother left him (they were never married) when I was an infant. He lived in the area and I saw him once or twice a week until I was 9, when he moved to Detroit (and later to Florida) and we began a ritual of seeing each other once a year or so. When I was a kid my dad was my best friend, because the time I got to spend with him was my only reprieve from my home life. But as I got older, I began to resent him for moving halfway across the country and leaving me behind, and our relationship became further and further strained. Eventually we talked about this (he found a poem I'd written about this on an old blog) and things have been...gradually improving since then, but he still gets on my nerves sometimes. I love him to death, though, and I know he'll be there for me when I need him for as long as he can...that just doesn't really translate into us being able to carry out substantive conversations on a regular basis or me really feeling comfortable with him knowing the intimate details of my life. I'm not sure how much that will ever change. I have never really been able to shake the feeling that, try as he might, my father does not know me. He's never met the majority of my close friends, he missed all the little day-to-day bits and pieces of me growing up, and now those day to day details are mine, not my parents'. 

My half-sister and my half-niece on my dad's side live in California. They used to live in Maryland until about my sophomore year of high school, and I was closer to them then. I once semi-ran away from home to their house for a week over the summer, I think it was the summer before my freshman year of high school. I should explain that my half-sister is 41 and is less than two months younger than my mother. Her daughter is 18, only three years younger than me. But she's been __-going-on-40 her whole life, because my sister treats her more like a girlfriend than like a daughter. While they could serve as a neutral place in times of great need, I have never really felt comfortable around my sister and her daughter. I feel very...different from them. They're divas with long straight hair, they wear tiny designer clothes and my sister owns a BMW convertible, they live beyond their means, they are very very religious (like read the Bible together aloud before bed religious). I have always felt a need to be fake when I am with them. So my sister and I call each other on major holidays (I think the record length of time we've talked for is about 4 minutes) and she sends me pictures of milestones in my niece's life and we call that a relationship. My father wants very much for us to be more like sisters. I...as bad as this sounds, I love them, I just don't think I like them very much

So growing up in my house, I consistently lived with my mom and my younger half-brother and half-sister from her marriage to my now-ex-stepfather. I've never really thought about my brother and sister as half-s, but for clarification purposes now it's important. My mom got married when I was three, my sister was born when I was four, and my brother when I was five. I don't have a clear memory of the first time their father was violent towards me or my mother, all my memories of it seem like they were routine already, the shock factor wore off when I was very young. He left for the first time shortly after my brother was born. He came crawling back shortly after, and my mom took him back, promising herself that if he ever left again, she was done. When I was in fourth grade he was cheating on her and she threw him out of the house; he went to live with the woman he'd been cheating with. My mom lay crying on the kitchen floor the morning after he left and I turned off the scrambled eggs that were burning on the stove, called the school pretending to be her (using my best grown-up voice; remember, I was 9) and got us excused for the day, and sat with her stroking her hair as she was crying. She vowed that we were done with him, that we were going to start over and made lots of other wonderful-sounding promises/resolutions.They were separated for nearly a year, we moved to a better house in a better neighborhood and my mom established herself as an independent woman and I really thought the worst of it was over. And then he came knocking on our door one day and she took him back again. And at that point, for a really long time, I gave up on my mother. I didn't even respect her as a person. I hadn't realized how complicated these issues are, or been really aware of how much my mom was struggling on her own with the three of us. I'm so sorry I ever felt that way about her.

He left for the last time when I was in middle school. I can say nothing other than the fact that until recently, that was the greatest day of my life. That man was a tyrant, and I've finally gotten to the point where I can admit that he was abusive (rather than just hot-headed and violent). I'll never forget the following Christmas: he had promised my brother and sister that he was coming back (he moved to Georgia) for Christmas to see them, and then called on December 23rd to say something had come up and he wasn't going to be able to make it. I hope I never have to hate another human being like I hate him. By the end, my hatred of him was thinly veiled--nowadays I don't even try. But I fear that my openness about my feelings towards him drove the initial wedge between me and my siblings. That wedge got wider after he left, because I had to assume basic responsibility for them after school until my mom came home from work, and my brother and sister never believed my authority as caregiver was earned (possibly because they could tell I didn't want it). Regardless, beginning even when they were still married, because the way their shifts at the casino worked, one of them was home, cooked a meal, and went to sleep while the other worked and then they switched, I was the one who taught the kids to tie their shoes and write their names and get ready for school in the morning. I was the one who checked homework a lot of the time. The divide between us got greater as the two of them joined forces against me. And it got even worse as my mom started making more and more comparisons between them and me as I excelled in school and various clubs, etc. I would hate me too if my whole life all I'd been hearing is "Why can't you be more like Maya?"

It dawned on me recently that my brother and sister have grown up into being real people. In my head, I still think of them as my little brother and sister, like they're kids. But they're not. The problem is, I don't know who those people they've grown up into are. We've spent so long being at odds that we don't remember how to play nice. I try to hang out with them and my sister usually just shuts down (it's like pulling teeth to get her to hug me, but sometimes we can talk about boys or college or the SATs for a little while), and my brother and I try to do something together but inevitably end up fighting (usually just verbally now, it used to be very very physically). I feel like I lost my chance with them. I feel like we're going to grow up to be like my mom and her siblings--two of them live less than 15 minutes from us, but she only really sees them on holidays (if my aunt even wants to come downstairs for holiday dinner) or when she needs something fixed and calls my uncle over. She and my other uncle don't even call each other on their birthdays. 

I think I explained it once as I'm part of a family that actually flees to various corners of the country to get away from each other. It's not actually that drastic, I suppose, but we are very spread out, and fairly isolated in our spreadedness, if that makes sense. There are 8 people related to me by blood in the state of New Jersey. 1 in Florida. 2 in California. An unknown number in Kentucky because my mother's father (whom she has never met) had other children who live there (and presumably have children of their own). I have never and will never meet any of them. An unknown number in and around Savannah, GA where my family seems to have lived since we were slaves. My grandmother was the first to leave when she took a job with American Airlines in Philadelphia shortly after my mother was born, then moved to NJ when the casinos opened in Atlantic City. This seems to have caused a giant rift in the family: from what I can gather, my grandmother has four siblings and only ever speaks to one of them. 

My grandmother lives 15 minutes from me, and her youngest children, my mom's little brother and sister, as well as my uncle's 11 year old son all live in her house, but we don't see them often. I haven't seen my grandmother in months. I called her on Mother's Day. And I love my Nana--she's one of my favorite people in my whole family. But I would feel entirely strange calling her out of the blue, when there is no specific purpose. I go to her house for holiday dinners or random family dinners and when the adults sit at the table and talk politics/history/gossip, and the kids run downstairs to watch TV and play video games, I sit by myself in the living room and read. This has always been my position. Besides my rediscovered ex-step-BROTHER, there's no one my age in my family. My brother and sister are 16 and 17, but out of habit and circumstance, I suppose, they hang out with the younger kids downstairs. I'm a loner in my family. I've never really quite felt like I fit. It's the same feeling I used to get when my mom would shake her head at me and say, "You're your father's daughter" and I could tell it wasn't a compliment. 

Long story short, there is a long legacy of my family simply breaking itself apart. We're there for each other in times of need--I could write an equally long post about all the things we're done for each other when help was needed, but all that day-to-day lovey-dovey family-game-night eating-together kind of stuff? It's not us. The first time I can ever remember my mother saying she was proud of me was as she was hugging me goodbye on move-in day freshman year at Princeton. It made me cry because I'd been working for those words for as long as I could remember. Our relationship has gotten so much better since we've been in separate places; sometimes I marvel at the fact that I laugh and joke on the phone with my mom like we're friends, or that I told her about my first date with my boyfriend, or that she's finally stopped yelling at me about grades and why aren't I trying harder. But when we're close enough to be in each other's hair again, we remember how much our styles of existence really just clash, and the animosity begins again. I spend most of my time at home sitting on the couch in my living room, because my sister has claimed our room as entirely her own and I frankly do not feel welcome there. I try to convince them to play games or watch movies: my sister is unresponsive, my mother says "maybe later" or tries and falls asleep, and my brother leaves halfway through because we get into a fight. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome, right? 

I haven't seen the vast majority of my extended family in 7 years. That's a third of my life, and arguably the most important third. To a degree, they've become vague concepts in my head, shaped by the (usually bad) details I hear about their lives when the grown-ups are talking and shaking their heads. I'm sure I've become the same to them, the girl that goes to Princeton (and all the assumptions that come with that. Idk how true they are.) 

I think my family is why I'm not big on families. It's too easy to become a part of my family and too easy to lose that status. I am so sick of establishing familial connections to people and then having them snatched away--I will miss my mom's ex-boyfriend (who lived with us for 6 years and is arguably the closest thing to a normal father figure I have ever known) for the rest of my life. I may have gotten my brother back, but we'll never get the 7 years we'd lost each other for back. My family is transient. It changes so much I can't keep track of it. I don't even have my older sister's address. We're...not close. I recognize that it can be different, but I think my family was the first thing I ever learned to strive to be independent of, and I'm not sure I can ever shake that feeling. I don't know how being part of the kind of family that eats dinner together would feel: comforting or trapping? And I don't know if any changes I made could ever effect my family's overall structure. I suppose that's no reason not to try though, especially with the 8 of us in NJ. I should feel like I know my family.