Blaze of Golly

Interesting phone conversation with my sister - first in years.  And it went very well, am happy to say.  Expect we both let a lot roll right over us, stuff that might have messed us up years back.

Quite a few things were clarified over those 90 minutes, in a blazing light of illumination: 

One - we still play our family version of whisper down the lane.  My oldest brother is in the hospital in Norristown, about 30 minutes from my house.  How did I find out?  My #2 brother, who lives in Australia, called my sister yesterday, who lives in New Jersey, to let her know, then she called me today.  First, she talked about my great-niece's birth - Mike's first grandbaby - then mentioned Mike had also called about... Thus, it has always been.  At one point, if Mom wanted Peter & Mim to get important info, she'd share it with Mike & Kerry, with the unspoken hope they'd relay it back to PA & NJ. 

Two - my thought process, my communication patterns, my expectations of life are all the flip side of my sister's. 

Three - she considers our family challenges to be on par with the marjority of families, certainly no big whoop.  All families are, indeed, dysfunctional to one degree or another.  But our family went so far beyond the beyond.  At least in my experience.  It's important to remember that Mim worked for some wildly dysfunctional families.  Working with autistic kids is a constant battle to reclaim functionality in a dys- reality, both for the children & the families.  For Mim, dysfunction seems to have been the norm.  Never saw it that way before.  The families I came into contact with tended to be...  well, whole.  That was my desired set point - whole, healthy, supportive.  Nope, not much similarity here, either. 


Throughout my lifetime, however my sister defined family was what was accepted by my parents as reality, who tended to see & respond to things through her filter.  Golly, there she was again, this afternoon, defining our family as about on par, no stranger than most others, no better & no worse.  And this is me standing up and saying, for at least my own inner ears to hear - balderdash!