To Forge a Family of One’s Own

For a large portion of my life — even when I was at an age where nobody thought or expected a girl so young to think of something so far into the future — I saw marriage as a second chance. Marriage was a chance to experience family, with a loving mother and father-in-law as substitutes for my biological parents. My desire for a family through marriage seemed irrational, but as a little girl, my perspective was overshadowed by desperation.

As a child, I felt confusion, unfamiliarity, and perhaps a little jealousy as I watched other children’s positive relationships with their parents. A part of me developed resentment at the children who seemingly had no external achievements that made them excel above other students, yet had parents who were proud of them nonetheless. I didn’t understand the logic behind it. After all, those children didn’t do anything to earn the love that they received.

As I grew older, I realised that love is an active choice given to someone. It depends less on the recipient of that love to have to try to ‘be loveable’ in the eyes of the giver. Instead, the giver has to actively choose to see the beauty in the person they choose to love, seeing something to admire and cherish even amidst the faults and weaknesses inherent in every human.

It is a moral imperative that a parent has to love their biological child. After all, the child didn’t ask to be born. Loving their child is an active choice made by the parent, as a bare minimum, to bring someone into this world without their prior knowledge or consent. The decision to bring life into this world entails the responsibility to nurture it. To refuse to do so is an abandonment of ethical responsibility.

In reality, however, there are so many reasons why a child is born that have nothing to do with love. Accidental pregnancies. A father who refused to wear protection. Societal obligations. The pressure to conform. The desire to appear ‘normal’. The need for child labour to generate additional income for the family. Wanting to continue your bloodline without regard for your child’s individual personhood. And a million other reasons unknown. Yet these reasons share a common trait: they are fundamentally selfish acts.

For many parents, children are not considered people with distinct personalities. From the parents’ point of view, children only serve as biological extensions of them, like an arm or a limb they can’t control; they try to, through an arsenal of weapons ranging from psychological manipulation to direct abuse. “For the greater good of the family” is used as a moral justification to control the child and make them feel selfish for enforcing boundaries.

Sometimes, we will never be enough for our family, no matter what we do. At first, we try to conform and erase the parts of ourselves they deem unacceptable. Eventually, we feel suffocated. We try to explain our point of view to them in a timid voice and a hunched, submissive posture, hoping that our “respectful” delivery will get our point across, but to no avail. We face further retribution, raised voices, endless shouting matches — the home becomes a war zone.

You don’t know how to interact with them; any little thing could set them off. So you stay quiet. You start wondering if you are crazy. After all, that seems more probable than the proposition that everybody around you is crazy and you just so happen to be the only sane one. You start taking notes and collecting evidence. Everything has to be recited verbatim. Otherwise, you get told so often that what happened to you didn’t happen and that you are crazy, so you develop the investigative precision of a police detective.

Time and time again, you are confronted with painful realities. Like plunging face-first into a body of cold water, you are forced to face the realisation that all is hopeless. Reconciliation may not be possible. No matter what you do, you may never receive the peaceful and loving relationship that you desire.

Eventually, you begin to feel hopeless. Societally, hopelessness is often seen as the end. The failed protagonist waves his white flag in defeat. Yet, I’ve found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, hopelessness can be liberating. In such a case, we are no longer burdened with the responsibility of changing an unchangeable situation.

One night, I decided to give up any attempts to talk to my family beyond perfunctory small talk necessary for practical purposes. Some people are psychologically incapable of considering a point of view beyond their own, and also lack the desire to empathise.

We cannot change someone who does not want to change themselves, especially someone who refuses to entertain the possibility that there is anything short of perfection in themselves to begin with. Lacking the ability or willingness to improve, there is little else we can do about the situation.

That night, even as an atheist, I kneeled on the floor and prayed. To whom? I don’t know. Like writing an email without a recipient, I prayed to a God without a name. Through my prayer, I have accepted that some things are outside my locus of control and that I can trust whoever was listening to handle them.

It takes courage to be hopeless, to let go of control. To trust someone else to handle it for you.

While I cannot choose the family I was born into, I can finally decide to forge a family of my own: Friends are family — not by blood, but by love.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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