family matters

So... I´m in Peru! You´ll hear (and see) more about Lima, Cuzco, the Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca sometime in the near future. For now, some musings on an altogether different subject: family.

I´m traveling for these 10 days with an amazing family. Chief among their amazing attributes is the fact that they all love each other, and care about each other, and really enjoy being around one another. They have their idiosyncracies, as all systems do, but man, are these dynamics healthy.

Frankly, it makes me kinda sad sometimes. I love my family because they are my family and I love them (how´s that for a nice tautology?). I know beyond a doubt that both of my parents love me -- I have always known that. They support all of my hare-brained schemes like flying off to remote parts of the world for months or years. They cheer me on. They are family.

But. We´re definitely missing that thing where you all get along and love each other. My parents fell out of love before I even could know they were in it, I think. They loved us kids, and they made a go of it, but that "go" involved both of them employing really unhealthy methods of dealing with each other and with us kids by extension (such as avoidance, triangulation and passive-aggressive behavior). Oddly, or perhaps perfectly understandably, they are both much happier and nicer to each other now that they are divorced (and well-therapized, in my mom´s case).

I totally understand that they were acting out of their own respective desperations while they were stuck inside a marriage that wasn´t working, but still, that environment shaped me. Proactive as I am, I decided somewhere around high school that I was rejecting those unhealthy coping methods. I, um, probably went sort of extremely to the other side of things (aided and abetted by four years steeped in German culture) and now I am very direct, I pretty much always say what I´m thinking, and I am kinda allergic to any kind of avoidance or passive-aggressive behavior, even when it might be considered within healthy range. I´m just not going there, you know?

I´m not a child of divorce, exactly, but I am an adult of divorce, and a child of a really unhealthy marriage, and this is the way I am trying to ensure for myself that my own marriage, should it come to pass-- or any other relationshp of mine--won´t unconsciously mirror theirs.

So. Yeah. That´s what I´m thinking about in between the various Wonders of the World.