Family

Sometimes we all feel like the easiest and most sensible thing in the world would be to abandon our families. It's easier to sell them out, to talk poorly of them, to block them, to ignore them, because we know, in the end, they are our family, and they will come, crawling or running or slinking back because they are attached to us through dna and blood and perhaps the same nose. It's easy to hate them, because usually, they give us so much to hate. It's easy to be annoyed because we spend so much time listening to them rattle their keys or breathe too loudly. It's easy to be crushed by them because they know us, and our ways and our weaknesses.

But the thing is, they're family. There's always time to forgive, to move on, to move forward with them. There's always time to kiss and make up, to blow up and bandage or to revolt and relent. With family, there is always another moment. That is the worst and the best thing about family. We hate them because they know us too well, even when we feel like they don't understand us at all.

How many times have we, as a collective generation, screamed, "You just can't understand?" It took me longer than most to reach that point; I still find myself yelling it to my mother when she refuses to acknowledge the progression of my romantic relationship or the reason I actually can wear jeans to work. She over-shares about what it is like to be pregnant but refuses to tell me the story of how she met my father. She is awkwardly private and publicly hurtful. But in the end, whether she understands my day-to-day, she does understand in a way that no one else can because she was there in the beginning. She was there for the teen-angst. She was simply there.

My father, too, has been the victim of "not understanding." But he, too, understands because of morning breakfasts and steamy Saturdays eating McDonalds in the car while the windows fogged. Whether or not he doesn't understand why I sit in his car, breathing heavily, on the verge of a panic attack, doesn't mean he doesn't understand the root of my tiny Polish nose or the historic reason why I write poems.

Sometimes, I want to shrug them off, pretend like I could go somewhere else for the holidays and not have to deal with the fights or the bi-polar attitude. Sometimes, I wish all these things. But, other times, like last night when we were all eating pasta together and talking, I wish nothing more than continue making choices to be int hat place. We never know what to say to them, because there is a generational difference and sometimes they just can't understand. But the intimacy and the tie of the same fingertips or the same toes or the same way we brush our hair--that can never be replaced.