Family anxieties

I am so very glad that I get along with my boyfriend's family.

I'm trying to think of a way to say all this without sounding like a terrible person.

See, I'm a funny person about family, and this is something that my introversion very negatively feeds into. My mother is the third of six in her family, and her family is still very close. She was the only one who left Georgia permanently (until my aunt, the second child, suddenly bolted for England without warning anyone a few years ago), and my father is introverted like I am. I am, resultantly, nowhere even approaching as close to that side of the family as they would like, tending to be far more like my father on the privacy end of the spectrum as well as on the inability to build relationships over the phone bit.

I feel like a bad person sometimes because I am very apathetic about that aspect. I love them in the way that you love people you don't know very well but you know that you should love, but it is very hard for me to extend it beyond that because I am not a person who builds relationships over the phone. It just doesn't work. I am very cool with them when I am around, but, when I am not, I don't find myself able to build up whatever it is that makes people call each other. I can maintain a relationship over the phone, but that's only if I know you very well. I like seeing them, but I haven't lived close to them. I would gladly go see them if I lived close to them, but I don't, and I just don't understand how people do this with small talk.

Another contributing factor to my difficulty with communicating with that side of my family is the fact that they are TOO close for me. I'm a private person (about odd things; I can tell complete strangers about my sex life, but I don't speak often in person about music - blogs are different), and they are very close in a way that just...it isn't me. It's the kind of closeness where, if you don't fit into it, something is wrong with you, which further alienates me - and the exception was my grandmother, who, sadly, died recently.

As an example of this, a couple of years ago I was in a position where I might have the opportunity to go out to Georgia from North Carolina while on one of my breaks for holidays, and I called my grandmother on Christmas Day to ask if it would be okay. My aunt took the phone and said, "This is your aunt, if you remember you have one," and then proceeded to tell me that my mother never listened to her in advising this and of COURSE my grandmother couldn't handle having a baby around and no, I could not visit. I just wanted to show Morgan to her. (My grandmother had been okay with it, and I also dislike that my aunt decided that no, she was the arbiter of all decisions in that area, completely removing my grandmother's agency.) I resented this on many levels.

As a result, my grandmother died without meeting her great-granddaughter. No, I have not forgiven over that, either, although I hadn't thought about it much until recently. I don't discuss it with my mom, either, because I would rather just let it go and not drag her into it. She's still close to her family, and she's still close to me, and the two don't interfere.

The bottom line is that I didn't want to call my aunt and have her guilt me for not calling, which was inevitable once I stopped calling because my life got busy in my late teens. I didn't want to call my grandmother and have either my aunt pick up and guilt me or my racist, misogynistic, paranoid uncle (who said I would never make it through Marine boot camp) pick up the phone and say that he was going to spank me or something similarly creepy. I didn't know anyone else well enough to call them.

The thing is, that kind of closeness is, for people like me, closeness through coercion. It's a closeness borne of the idea that, well, you're family, so you HAVE to be close OR ELSE, instead of the idea that you are family and you CHOOSE to be close because family is something based off of love, which, again, is based in choice. You choose to love people. You choose to be close to people. When I get the feeling that someone's attitude is anything but, it causes a real rift with me.

That worked similarly with my in-laws when I was married, and it was probably a good portion of what contributed to my divorce, honestly. My ex would periodically tell me, "You need to call my mom; she says that you don't call her enough." I'd tell him that if she asked for me when she called him I would talk to her, but, again, I don't build relationships over the phone. I was never hostile - I just had difficulty building closeness. She wanted me to automatically be a daughter when, while I appreciated that, that seemed to me to be imposing - I didn't know her well enough to call her every single day and talk, and the feeling that I was automatically expected to felt, again, like coercion.

I didn't realize how much of an impact that had until I had to deal with the custody issues, and, even though I had let my ex take my son freely to his home state when he wished, they hijacked him, saying that they were afraid that they would never see him again if I took him. I had never had a problem picking up when they called when I had him and they wanted to talk. They had never missed a chance to see him - indeed, they had had him over half of his godsdamned life, but, because I had an attitude alien to what they found acceptable, they couldn't let him be with me (and the situation was such that I could not challenge this).

My mom's family, incidentally, think I am to blame on the custody issues as well, for both that reason and because, when I was homeless in the city where my ex had, essentially, stranded me (long story), I did not magically materialize money and a car and move to the city where my in-laws had my son. That's how much they hold against me for not being as close as they would like.

Anyhow, I'm going to start using the "f" word a lot if I keep along that vein, so let me get back to the positive in the first part of the post.

So, my boyfriend - I've been with him for nearly a year, and you don't spend that long with someone without usually getting to know their family at least a little, especially if you live as close as we do. This kind of thing, since my in-laws, had me slightly worried, because it just - shit. Come on. My experience with families seems to be mainly people who want you to be close through the coercion of expectations. (My father's family isn't that way, even though my paternal grandmother drives me more than a little bit crazy.)

However, from day one they have impressed me, which really shouldn't surprise me since The Boyfriend and I sometimes seem to operate from almost a hive mind of sorts and he loves his family a great deal as well. I'm very, very fond of my de facto in-laws (on both sides, actually - his parents are both divorced and remarried), and like the families that come with both of those sides as well.

He, like me, is introverted, and private (and far more reserved than I am), and probably doesn't keep very good contact (with extended family), but, rather than this causing rifts and arguments and the like, it's just accepted as part and parcel, and, when we go to family gatherings (Thanksgiving being a recent one), they are all very open and loving, but without the feeling of pressure that accompanied the usual gatherings in my experience. There's not a sense of conflict; rather, it's simply love and joy at seeing these people again. You can tell that they are not there because they feel like they have to be - they WANT to be there, with these people, right now.

And so did I. It was nice.

Incidentally, my daughter seems to be the same way - she's very affectionate when she feels free to be, but if she has the slightest feeling that she is being pressured into it she'll back right out. I hope that I can give her a safe family space like that, the way my parents gave me (I am very close to my parents, other family issues notwithstanding), and, apparently, the way my boyfriend's parents and family gave him.

So, those are my probably dysfunctional views on family. I'm probably colder than your average person on that topic, but I never understood what is so difficult to grasp about the idea that some people need to be allowed to be themselves in developing relationships - otherwise those relationships are artificial, and I have little patience for artifice.

If that makes sense. Am I just extraordinarily screwed up? I've often wondered this, because apparently a lot of people think I am in that area.