Belonging in the family

My parents are aging. Although they are doing OK, I watch them negotiate the new challenges of their increasing years. There are social changes as their friendship circle diminishes (I don’t think I need to spell that one out more). Physical changes in aging bodies with joint issues and weaker muscles and lowered energy, hearing and sight impairment — although otherwise they seem quite healthy right now. So much is visible to me. But their emotional world is closed unless they choose to talk to me. We FaceTime every week so I keep up with their comings and goings and have plenty of conversation time, but we don’t tend to get very deep unless we’re in person.

Right now I’m visiting them and we have more time for proper conversation. It’s beautiful. Dad’s still telling his dad-jokes, the same ones he always has for as long as I remember! Mum plays with my hair, tells me I look tired, fusses around me and plies me with various things to eat. The way of mothers throughout history. It’s mundane stuff. It’s precious stuff. I know the clock is ticking.

They know it too. My mum cries as she talks about death and end of life, what makes life worth living for now, and how she’ll know it when the odds are stacked too high against her. It’s just over a year since she finished chemo and the trauma of this brush with death is still clearly with her. As it is with me. And no doubt my dad too, though he’s of a generation where men don’t speak so much of their concerns or anxieties.

Until today.

We were talking about the broad arc of life, all the changes they’ve seen in themselves and in the world. My focus was on my mum in her distress and I was encouraging her to reflect on the happiness and health of her life overall. A loving husband, financial security and a comfortable home they own, two children born without difficulty, no major illnesses or surgeries, little stress or trauma, and as an identical twin she had a lifetime companion who knew her better than anyone else ever could. It was perhaps different for my dad. He’s older and was more aware of the start of the Second World War, was evacuated from the dangers of London, suffered malnourishment from the rationing, not to mention that his father died when he was young and he was brought up as an only child in poor conditions by his mother — and a lot of aunts!

I know these things as facts about my dad’s life, but they don’t usually have any emotional tone when he talks about them. Until today, when he acknowledged that he felt the lack of his own father had coloured his whole life. That he had always felt unable to relate to his son as he had no role model for father-son relationships and that he found it harder to feel included in a group of men than among women. “I wonder where I belong” he mused finally.

And isn’t that the question! I ask myself the same very often. I am such a daddy’s girl, after all — our thinking is aligned! And in these few days with my family, I know I belong here at least. I feel the warmth of their love, the depth of their familiarity with me and my habits, the joy and pride they feel for the things that are going well in my own life, as it unfolds and I too grow older.

Such a feeling of acceptance and belonging is precious indeed. I think it’s what we’re all looking for or hoping for. I hope my dad feels it too for himself in the family that he created and nurtured. He is right that he had no paradigm for father-son relationships but of course he also had to forge his relationship with me as his daughter afresh, he’d never done that before either — and I reckon he did a pretty good job 🙂