When Suzie and my therapist give me the same advice, I know it is sound and likely something that I should probably heed. In this case, it was putting some distance between me and my family, something that is directly anathema to the way I was raised, and to how I’ve tried to conduct my life over the past few decades. That’s a long time to indoctrinate the psyche into a routine, and all the more difficult to break because of it.
In the Philippines, nothing is more important than family. You stick together no matter what, bound by blood and living arrangements, and you do for family what you would never do for anyone else. In my own prickly, socially-anxious way, I’ve tried to do that for the past half-century, and it’s taken me all that time to realize that the idea of family has changed.
Whether it was the example of Dad sending money back to the Philippines and supporting his siblings, or the opposite end of the spectrum of my Mom pining and wishing for a playmate as an only child, the notion of family was drilled into my head. Over the years, the addition of guilt, and the spoken and unspoken responsibilities and expectations of the first-born child, created shadows upon shadows, and I struggled with being a good son and brother in the face of often-disparate treatment. It manifested itself in various ways of acting out and deciphering how to gain unconditional love when I was so decidedly different. That cannot have been easy for any of us, and in seeing that now I am given a glimpse of how to forgive.
Part of that is in the decision to step back at this point. While COVID may have contributed to a lessening of time spent with them, I’d slowly and quietly started to pull away from family for several years. After a big blow-out fight with my brother at Christmas one year, and the umpteenth time that my parents asked me to be the understanding one, I remember sitting at their kitchen table and just crying. It wasn’t so much out of sadness or injustice anymore, it was simple exasperation. In a scene that would be repeated again and again, my Mom realized it was wrong and apologized, but the words rang hollow because they’d been said before and would be said over and over in the years to come. We’re always sorry, and we always just keep on hurting each other.
And so for my own mental well-being, I’ve withdrawn a lot over the last few years, cutting back on planning get-togethers, no longer insisting that I maintain some type of friendship with my brother, and I’ve noticed that no one has picked up the slack, which is its own message, and its own confirmation. If I feel excluded these days, it’s as much my fault as anyone else’s, but I now realize there is purpose and reason for it; people will find a way, no matter how convoluted or bizarre, to protect themselves from hurt, even if it’s all we’ve ever known.
My own head is adept at self-preservation, even when I’m not quite aware of what is happening. Like animals born in captivity, we don’t necessarily know what we’re missing, it just never feels quite right, and fitting into a typical boy’s mold in this world is trying enough for most boys. It was also a long time ago – another generation really, and things were decidedly different. There was so much we simply didn’t know.
There are deeper things at work here, stories and situations that I’ve mostly held back, as much out of protecting them as for my own desire to move beyond and pretend they never happened. That’s not always healthy, and as much as I want to let it go, I also need to exhume and address them, if only to acknowledge and move beyond the hold and influence they continue to exert.
The holidays have always exacerbated this; instead of being a healing time, they seem to bring out all the latent grievances, illuminating and highlighting the chasm that has grown between me and a family from which I’ve always felt, and been treated, as different. Too delicate for some, too harsh for others, and no way of winning or even being unconditionally loved or accepted. In turn, I’ve created my own ostracization – for protection, for prevention, for punishment – and for the preservation of my own worth.
That is going to have to be ok for this holiday season.
That is going to have to be enough.
And it will be.
