I am still thinking about Friday’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: failure. Now that I am middle aged (by my clinic definition, which put over 90 as older), I think the biggest failure of my generation is a peaceful world. For me, a peaceful extended family. I am good friends with my father’s family and my ex-husband’s family. But the maternal family, well. I have thought about that for the last two days: could I have changed that?
Yes, but at what cost? My sister followed the “family rules” on that side. She is dead from cancer. My mother also followed the rules and died younger than me from cancer. I can’t say that the rules cause cancer. But doesn’t our culture say over and over, be yourself? To fit in the family diaspora, I would have to play the triangulation game and gossip about others as they have gossiped about me. No, thank you, no. I don’t want to. They seem to need a family member to hate and have chosen me and labelled me and call me angry. I think they are silly and emotionally immature. At the very least, I would have had to keep my mouth shut and accept them gossiping about me.
The family failure and untrue gossip, with no one ever asking for my viewpoint, mirrors the US culture. Split and needing someone to hate. At this rate, we’ll need the hippies back, with flowers and joy and counter culture and dropping out. Someone fun, at least until the drugs wear off. Someone to say, we need joy back, we need friends, we need love.
It’s not just my failure though. The family failed. They make cruel choices and target people. It happened in my generation, my mother’s, my grandparents. I wonder if it is happening in my adult children’s generation. Who is the next target? Who will refuse to counter-gossip and fight with each source? My adult children are not part of it at all, because I had less and less interest in spending time with mean gossips and I did not want to expose my children.
Lies and drama and meanness and gossip. I hope my adult children’s generation does better. We went to Wicked on Thursday. I did not like it much. Too much drama. Why do we want drama? The world seems more and more surreal. Give me the lovely hike we did on Friday instead, Echo Canyon.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
This post reminds of the philosophy that every person has a different version of you in their minds.
Before Thanksgiving a friend called to wish me a happy Thanksgiving and inquire about my plans. It was the usual thing. I heard myself say, “It’s OK. My family was so weird, I’m good with walking my dog and having dinner by myself.” It could sound like I’m glad they’re all dead, but that isn’t it. It’s more like, “Well this is good.” And it is. As for them? My dad was so sick, my mom was a mean drunk and my brother a lost soul. ALL of them are probably better off dead — my brother (post mortem) actually showed up in a dream and told me he was. I believed him.
A lot of noise is made about “family” but why? My family is made up of people I don’t share DNA with and some of them are not even the same species and some of them aren’t even animals. The great gift we have in our lives is love and maybe we love a landscape (and maybe that love is requited) or a tree or light or something we do. That said, I miss my extended family very much and I miss my dad. ❤️
Hugs, Martha. I miss mine, too.
When I turned 35 I admitted to middle age. At the time, the life expectancy for a man in the US was 72 years. My mom asked, “What does that make me?” She considered herself middle-aged and was 69. She was “delivering meals to seniors” in her late 70s, still not considering herself “old”. My 84 year old brother is still younger than some of the 50 year old patients I had.
I kinda took the easy way out here, avoiding the bigger issues. (At Thanksgiving dinner the other night, near the end, my brother remarked about a conversation with a friend and said, “I LIKE my siblings.”
Yes. Middle age became 60-90 when I had a group of patients over 90 and at one point five women over 100. The oldest two were 104. That turns out to be much much older than 70. They certainly did care about my information according to the medical books, and rightly so!
Lies and drama and meanness and gossip are rife in my family, too, which is why these days I tend to remain on the periphery as much as possible. But over the years I’ve learned to accept that the failure to accept difference is theirs, not mine for being different…
It takes two to tango.
And if the families are dancing a dance we don’t like, we may refuse.