Guest Blog From Jackie – Family

Ani has difficulty talking about the subject of family. So maybe it is premature or inappropriate for me to start with it. Ani lives mostly in the present which is delightful, but family is often about history. Ani mostly likes to talk about things that are fun for him, and family is not one of those things. My goal in talking about family is to create a structure for Ani’s story that is somewhat chronological and thus satisfies my need for linear organization. This is not a better way to tell a story, but I hope it will add a dimension and thus give Ani’s story greater depth and create more understanding in some ways. I have learned more about relationship and family from Ani than I ever dreamed possible and I would like to share some of what I have learned.

What really stands out for me in my 27 years of knowing Ani is how deeply the subject of family is embedded in his story while at the same time Ani cannot bring together any coherent sense of family for himself. “Relationship” is an abstraction of difficult meaning for Ani and “family” has shades and multitudes of meaning and innuendo galore. While many abstractions are frustrating to him, this is even more so. Many of the words that we might take for granted such as “aunt” or “cousin” or “grandfather” or “child” or “parent” leave him confused or frustrated or overwhelmed. Yet in practice, Ani is all about relationship. And in my own way, so am I. Yet often when it comes to family, he and I stand with fists clenched, eyes glaring, squaring off in opposition at opposite corners of the ring. It’s as if we speak a different language.

It’s as if Ani wants to start at the beginning, as if we are talking about learning the times tables before trying to learn algebra. So that’s where I’ll start. Ani and I go over and over the fundamentals of relationship almost every day – consistency, trust, reliability, honesty, respect, listening, understanding the other person’s point of view and taking it into account as much as possible. Ani has always demanded these things of me and been extremely sensitive when they were compromised. Relationship as a concept in practice has always there between us. As Ani and I learn about relationship together, it spills over into all of my relationships: consistency, integrity, non-judgmental listening, openness to the other’s experience, being responsive rather than reactive…all of these lessons benefit my relationships with family, neighbors, colleagues, clients. For Ani, these lessons seem to be about exploring and re-writing his own history. He doesn’t say this in so many words; rather he acts it out. He lives it. I am not saying he is an expert at relationship by any means, only that he is acutely sensitive to it and this sensitivity has been my guide and my teacher.

What is any child’s first knowledge of family? Being inside mom. What’s it like in there? Warm? Squishy? Patterns of light and dark, patterns of sound, patterns of movement? The baby starts to organize his world around these things. It’s what is known, predictable, survivable. Then comes birth and a huge change occurs. All of a sudden the baby is thrust into a topsy-turvy world that must at first seem terrible strange and alien. Before, the baby had to do nothing in order to eat. Now, the baby must find a way to get food. Before, the baby had to do nothing to fill his blood with oxygen and to get rid of waste. Now, the baby must breathe, pee, and poop. Not all babies make this transition, and if they don’t, they die.

The baby must learn to become aware of the sensations within him and then communicate them to his care-takers in order to survive. Hunger, thirst, wet, pain, fright, happy, content, irritated. The baby needs to learn the distinct differences between these internal experiences and then find ways to communicate each of them differently so that another person understands him and then responds to meet the need underneath the communication. Wow. What a huge task. Newborns' brains are working furiously to learn to do this, and good care-takers can do much to help it along by being consistent, listening carefully to another’s experience, responding to their understanding of what is being communicated by another person, and checking to see if their understanding was correct by carefully observing the baby’s reaction.

We never stop learning to do this. If we’ve made it through childhood with some glitches in this process, we continue to go back and re-learn it throughout our lives within all of our relationships. Human beings were built for relationship. We can’t survive without them. We start learning about them from the day of conception.