Dysfunctional Families (and other joys)

Who are we if not products of the first quarry of breath - the family? Raw, unmanaged, planned or perchance - we are babies who enter the universe with our lungs ballistic, versed in the art of annoying everybody, with our insistences and our demand for unwavering attention, but also to beguile.

 

Whether we are a chip of a dream or the product of a ritual or the gift of a drunken night, we are realities in the lives of a couple which looks onto us, sometimes with wonder, more often with unmitigated exasperation.

 

We are cradled with care, often as a result of a personal sacrifice, a priority over oneself. We are babies - we coo on recognition, we reach out for their faces with our little hands as if we are reaching out for light, and we smile on hearing their familiar voices. And however slowly it might be, we find places in our parent’s hearts.

 

But things change as we grow. We have a rough patch with our sister, scalding acrimony with our brother. We start seeing our parents as flawed human beings, people less invincible and more tired  then we’d ever imagined. People we are ready now to judge, people we now find easy to be cruel with. Suddenly the dynamics of our relationships change.

 

We move closer to other lives, and drift away from our primary caregivers, our first loves. Our needs change, our cravings are discoverers, and we open some cupboards in our soul to shelve a heap full of memories away. We move closer to other people, we become other people.

 

But our past is a forever undertow to our lives. And the strings pull us back - often for festivities, often for tragedies: sometimes as compulsion, often reluctantly. And we discover our heartstrings start to play again. Old joys well up, old griefs too. What we’d been told, when we were ignored. Slights we didn’t know we remembered, heartbreaks which still had fracture lines.

 

But beneath it all, our blood remembers it’s moorings, an old affection slowly blankets old afflictions,  and we realise we’d deserted them, but we’d never left them at all. We were carrying them inside as simmering geysers, as dark rivers. But they were also breath, they were also our first joy. And we move towards each other as long lost magnets,

 

And we know that maybe our blood finds its own tributaries, but that we are the same river moving towards the same sea. Our waters reflect the same sky. We are family.

 

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems which talk of the difficult art of surviving those closest to you   -

• The Truth of Lies
• Favourite People (Who We Love & Leave)
• On Some Additions to Introspective Psychology

Follow me on Instagram at @sunilgivesup.

Get in touch with me on uncutpoetrynow@gmail.com

Subscribe to my incandescent and poetic newsletter The Uncuts here - https://theuncuts.substack.com.

 

The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Untold Stories by Alexander Nakarada
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/5844-untold-stories
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license