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Apr. 29th, 2012 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liptonrm_backupIt seems like everyone around me is getting married or having babies, or some infernal combination of the two. Okay, not everybody, but in the past two years there has been an uptick in the number of blessed events I’ve had cause to celebrate. The whole thing reached its apex last month when my younger brother married his Australian fiancée in a nice, international ceremony in the Washington D.C. area. He then promptly moved with her to the other side of the world.
I’ll leave for another time the epic amounts of irony stemming from my Ron Paul-loving brother moving to a country with “commie” social programs like universal healthcare. And I don’t have much desire to talk about the details of the wedding itself—like most such events it was mired, for me, a family member, in both emotional and physical exhaustion. Afterwards I would have dearly liked a vacation to recover from the family “vacation” I had just finished (a cliché and a truth). Weddings can require the kind of diplomacy that diplomats at the UN would appreciate, a careful balancing of the needs of one party with the needs of the other party with the needs of the mother-of-the-groom who can’t believe that her little boy is moving to Australia. All weddings have drama.
I’ve played the role of “Sister-of-the-Groom” at two weddings now and there’s something strangely empty about it. Don’t get me wrong, I always felt appreciated and there was certainly more than enough work to go around, especially of the random, last minute errand type, but there’s little in the way of traditional, ceremonial importance let alone emotional catharsis. I wasn’t the Best Man or Maid of Honor (or even a bridesmaid), I wasn’t a parent or a grandparent; I was in a limbo of family connection, not quite a cousin but not really a member of the wedding party. I was an afterthought, the plus one.
That’s not to say that I wasn’t involved, I was very touched when this latest to be married brother asked me to sing at the Ring Ceremony and I’ve never felt anything other than appreciated and loved by my youngest brother and his wife. And while the nebulous state of my traditional role didn’t help, perhaps the greater disconnect came from my inherent singleness; I didn’t attend the events as part of a pre-packaged set. In fact, I’ve never been a part of a set and there’s nothing like looking around a wedding and seeing all of the different and diverse couples to make you realize how abnormal that state is. My solitariness only enhanced that feeling of being one step removed from the rest of the group.
My brothers, the drama queens they are, have had problems at each other’s weddings. I’ve joked about how their respective spouses were “breaking up the band” and, like most jokes, there was more than a little truth in it. I’ve always had this picture in my head of the three of us siblings as a single unit, a kind of fairy tale image that I crafted in my own mind. Of course, reality was and is a whole lot messier than that and our collective relationship has had its fair share of ebbs and flows over the years. But there as something about my brother leaving the country that was like the end of a book; things really won’t ever be the same. A part of me mourns for what used to be, for the photoshop picture of what we used to be.
I can’t remember a time without my brothers; their lives have been tied up with mine for my entire life. And now they’ve moved on to new stories while I remain back in the one they left. I am the perpetual post-graduate still floundering for a course. I could rant for days about how single life and the work of single adults is devalued, how society seems to place more value (the most value) on the married and the child-bearing, but I still can’t ignore how I envy my brothers for their initiation into that strange, new world.
The thing about family, though, is that you’re stuck with them. Even if I never see either of my brothers again they’re already a part of me, the person I am today was shaped by the ways we mirrored and contrasted, the ways we agreed and disagreed. I couldn’t get rid of them even if I wanted to and I know it’s the same for them; we’re all bound up and we always will be. I don’t know what the future holds for me or for them but I do know that we’ll all meet it as the people we’ve helped each other to create.
Family is hard. But sometimes it comes with a side of cake.
comments at http://liptonrm.dreamwidth.org/42029.html.
I’ll leave for another time the epic amounts of irony stemming from my Ron Paul-loving brother moving to a country with “commie” social programs like universal healthcare. And I don’t have much desire to talk about the details of the wedding itself—like most such events it was mired, for me, a family member, in both emotional and physical exhaustion. Afterwards I would have dearly liked a vacation to recover from the family “vacation” I had just finished (a cliché and a truth). Weddings can require the kind of diplomacy that diplomats at the UN would appreciate, a careful balancing of the needs of one party with the needs of the other party with the needs of the mother-of-the-groom who can’t believe that her little boy is moving to Australia. All weddings have drama.
I’ve played the role of “Sister-of-the-Groom” at two weddings now and there’s something strangely empty about it. Don’t get me wrong, I always felt appreciated and there was certainly more than enough work to go around, especially of the random, last minute errand type, but there’s little in the way of traditional, ceremonial importance let alone emotional catharsis. I wasn’t the Best Man or Maid of Honor (or even a bridesmaid), I wasn’t a parent or a grandparent; I was in a limbo of family connection, not quite a cousin but not really a member of the wedding party. I was an afterthought, the plus one.
That’s not to say that I wasn’t involved, I was very touched when this latest to be married brother asked me to sing at the Ring Ceremony and I’ve never felt anything other than appreciated and loved by my youngest brother and his wife. And while the nebulous state of my traditional role didn’t help, perhaps the greater disconnect came from my inherent singleness; I didn’t attend the events as part of a pre-packaged set. In fact, I’ve never been a part of a set and there’s nothing like looking around a wedding and seeing all of the different and diverse couples to make you realize how abnormal that state is. My solitariness only enhanced that feeling of being one step removed from the rest of the group.
My brothers, the drama queens they are, have had problems at each other’s weddings. I’ve joked about how their respective spouses were “breaking up the band” and, like most jokes, there was more than a little truth in it. I’ve always had this picture in my head of the three of us siblings as a single unit, a kind of fairy tale image that I crafted in my own mind. Of course, reality was and is a whole lot messier than that and our collective relationship has had its fair share of ebbs and flows over the years. But there as something about my brother leaving the country that was like the end of a book; things really won’t ever be the same. A part of me mourns for what used to be, for the photoshop picture of what we used to be.
I can’t remember a time without my brothers; their lives have been tied up with mine for my entire life. And now they’ve moved on to new stories while I remain back in the one they left. I am the perpetual post-graduate still floundering for a course. I could rant for days about how single life and the work of single adults is devalued, how society seems to place more value (the most value) on the married and the child-bearing, but I still can’t ignore how I envy my brothers for their initiation into that strange, new world.
The thing about family, though, is that you’re stuck with them. Even if I never see either of my brothers again they’re already a part of me, the person I am today was shaped by the ways we mirrored and contrasted, the ways we agreed and disagreed. I couldn’t get rid of them even if I wanted to and I know it’s the same for them; we’re all bound up and we always will be. I don’t know what the future holds for me or for them but I do know that we’ll all meet it as the people we’ve helped each other to create.
Family is hard. But sometimes it comes with a side of cake.
