Estrangement

Family dynamics are fascinating. When growing up you don't realize that the interplay between the players will result in political issues which impact people for many years into the future. I was watching a mid 40's woman explain why she had to go no contact with her extended family to save her mental health. She had been designated the family scapegoat and needed to escape the cycle which had kept her in that role. 

As we get older we realize that family ties may not be as beneficial to us as we once thought they would be. There is a distance created by a different lived experience which then requires a bridge be built to reconnect. The problem is that the relationship is sometimes deemed to be insufficiently beneficial aside from a reliance of shared genetics. We sometimes summarize it as "it's family" without sufficient weighing of what both sides gain after the passage of many years. 

For many people the holidays are fraught with angst over seeing people they barely got along with as children. The unions subsequently made and the children created only adding to an existing chasm. 

But there can come a time when everything is questioned particularly when a pandemic forces a full stop and a reflection on everything that came before.