Once upon a time, I wrote an article titled the love you can’t choose, and it was about family.
At the time, I had written it to describe my feelings towards being placed in a family without a real choice.
Having to uphold responsibilities that we didn’t sign up for, and meet expectations that weren’t set by us.
As you can imagine, my view of the situation was very biased at the time.
Along with a majority of my writing.
Because often times, it’s very much emotions and situations based.
I don’t like to be fake or hide anything, and so I often write about the current situation I’m in or emotions I’ve been experiencing.
But I wanted to revisit this one.
A bit of background
As I’m actually not quite sure when and where I had written about this, I wanted to provide some context to the newer audiences.
I’ve always felt a bit on the outside when it comes to my family.
For starters, I’m pretty much the only guy in my entire family full of women.
My dad was always working so I didn’t really get to spend time or see him much during my entire upbringing.
This always created a bit of distance when it came to me and my family.
Like I didn’t belong with them somehow and it didn’t make sense for me to go along with them for a majority of the things we did.
Even though I pretty much just went along with it.
What was deeper was my desire to change things.
To have a family one day where I would get to have a choice as to what happens.
A change on perspective for family
Today, I was sitting down with my mom’s mom (my grandma), and she had mentioned my mom had gained a bit of weight coming back.
I thought it was a bit rude and told her not to mention it to my mom.
Of course, I didn’t want her feelings hurt with my grandma’s brutal honesty.
And then my grandma said something profound.
Why wouldn’t I tell her the truth when it’s not good for her if I lied?
I thought about it and realized, she’s got a point.
Although I don’t completely agree, I understood what she meant.
When it comes to family, we don’t get to choose who it is.
We also don’t get to choose how they speak to us.
But we can choose how we see the situation and how we react.
Often times nowadays, we have the expectation that everyone should behave like our friends.
They should watch out for how we want to be spoken to, how we want others to respect us.
But family is different.
It’s the other way around so we don’t get to choose.
The love you receive
Look, I’m not saying your family should be able to just say whatever they want to you.
Because the fact of the matter is that we all have our own emotions and feelings.
Although someone may want to tell us something harsh, we may not always see it as a good thing.
More often than not, we’ll hear something we don’t like, and react.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Because at the end of the day, while our family doesn’t protect our feelings, we should remember that they have the best of intentions for us.
That they want us to be happy and healthy.
And their harsh words are usually accompanied by good intentions.
Do you have any family stories of similar sort?
Let me know in the comments!
Check out my last article about missing my partner.
You can also check out similar articles in the relationship stuff section.
I also write for Medium and a publication called P.S. I Love You.
Thank you so much for reading.
Love always,
Alex
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