It's impossible to remember a time when I didn't admire my sister's ability to connect to other people. Looking at where she is, back at what I experienced in her as I grew up, it dawns on me that she was creating the family she needed, which felt - at least to me - to so not be the one she was given. Us. Well, actually - me. Mim clearly felt a sense of kinship to Mike & Peter, with whom she grew up, with whom she was a contemporary, Peter being six years older, Mike just two years ahead of her. But the closeness ideally found in families, between siblings? I wonder. Praise be that Mim had the gift of developing those connections outside the random humans who shared her genetics & apparently little else.
Mim has remarkable connections to people around the globe. Her friends & family-of-the-heart stretch from our little hometown, across the USA, across the Pacific. For years I envied her, wished I was more like her, longed for the ability to create family to fill an apparent empty space.
Today, it dawned on me - for the very first time - that one reason I never developed that blessed gift was because I had the family I needed, the family that gave me the nurturing that would help me grow from seed to sapling to mature being. My own.
Writing about Peter & Mim in a recent older2elder posting brought that home. It's not new, this realization that they were the very sibs I needed to help learn the very lessons that would help me do work that matters deeply to me & promises to make a difference to others - to my friends, my community, maybe even the world. The new thought was that the reason I didn't feel the need to reach out is that what I truly needed was right in my own backyard.
Some people need to create their own family. I was blessed to be born with mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment