Something YOU Call Family

As my anniversary approaches, I contemplated writing a post about love as we age, love that follows us through our journey.  The longer I considered it however, I realized that there is a related and more universal topic.  Happy spouses may see themselves in a way that is emotionally more complicated than younger people might imagine.  Yes, they are in love, but they are also a family.  By birth?  No.  Chosen?  Yes.  Still, certainly a family.  Having ‘Something YOU Call Family’ may be more important as we age than at any other time in adulthood.

As you read this, you might personally be the center of a large extended family with many grandkids, or enjoy a nuclear family of three or four.  You may be a couple without children, or a ‘single’ person closest to a favorite sibling.  Along the way, you may have found and lost your soulmate, and while now solitary on some levels are still comforted by someone who makes you happy.  You may be in an untraditional relationship without much support from society.  Frankly, you may genuinely see your favorite pet as your true family.  You may be a widow, widower or divorcee — sadly alone but soldiering on with the help of those who love you.  In short, our situations vary greatly.

Yet, no matter what that situation is, it’s obvious that family is an important concept to our well-being, whether it be a small group, large tribe or one other person.  They KNOW us.  They know our qualities, traits, weaknesses and intimate secret details – but as the saying goes they ‘love you anyway’.

‘Blood is thicker than water’ is a rather hackneyed phrase – and blood can run cold as well. I often remember a line from a long ago syndicated television show called I’ll Fly Away.  A battered, young boy from a devastated household was counseled this way: “your family is like a game of poker, you can’t help what you’re dealt – but you don’t have to play with all the cards in your hand.”  You define your family.

Our nuclear families are certainly important, and while everyone wants to trade them in as a teenager, most of them provided us with some stable structure growing up.  If we are lucky, it had structure with both values and love.  But as we mature, and as we age, it is unclear what will constitute our family.  Which cards in our hand will we choose to play with?  And if we define our family, then we own some responsibility for it as well.  The benefits are innumerable, but these benefits are an odd-kind of free.  To make your family work there is a cost and there are conditions.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family –
in another city.
               — George Burns

[I apologize to all my family in many cities for that bit of comic relief.]

‘Something YOU call Family’, that affords you feelings of intimacy, has been shown repeatedly and universally to increase your chances of quality longevity.  Skills to create or maintain these relationships are not really technical in nature.  Actually they tend toward the prosaic and simple.  Yet, the touted benefits from research findings studying the effects of familial-type closeness are astonishing.  Sometimes the results of caring and tenderness on improved aging (or comfort to terminally ill patients) have even surpassed the reported impact from medications or high-tech treatments. (Of course, this is written before stem-cell treatments become common and change the definition of miracle.  Hopefully, love and caring will still yield their mighty magic.)

Whether the people of your ‘family’ are blood relations, or picked-by-hand, it matters little compared to the special space they fill in your life.  At this age most of us may not change our behavior with our family much.  We may want to, and some, like me, appreciate reminders.  Periodically, I review a reference I paraphrased in an article long ago.  It is a 6-step approach heavily borrowed from an old book, The Caring Question by Donald and Nancy Tubesing.  It includes the following six ways to sustain your chosen family unit as a healthy, loving entity (large or small, blood or not).

6-steps to Nourishing your Family

1. Reach out within your Family.  Even when you don’t feel like it, do it (big ways or small).
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2. Make the family top priority.  [Remember this is whatever YOU think of as family in your heart.]  Invest time and energy.  It is for you as much as them.
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3. Expand the family memory bank.  Reliving traditions, making new ones, recalling experiences and re-telling stories keeps the family connected.  [In my mind, for a couple, these ‘stories’ also help to keep that spark alive.]
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4. Deal with relationship problems in your family.  Work it out instead of walking out.  And before you start that ‘work’, consider the benefit you have because this person is in your life – then you can consider what your argument is really worth.  [Maybe this one just gets easier with age?]
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5. Find the forgiveness factor.  [No one is asking you to forget, just find a way to forgive – and act like it.]
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6. Accentuate the positive.  Affirm one another.   Showing gratitude is giving to others.  But taking the time to feel gratitude nurtures our own life.
   [My husband has always believed that a committed couple should show respect, courtesy and interest in one another. Basically, being polite.  Writing that, it sounds simple and trite; but so many people do not live that way.  Living that creed makes all the difference.]
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As our anniversary approaches, I would like to thank him for that creed.  And more than just saying it, I AM thankful.  That brings me to another final essential point for us all.

Whether blood or not, be grateful, and show thanks,
for that person, tribe, pet or other who means so much  –
that ‘Something You Call Family.’