Family Union

Families.... What are they? As the place where once we found insufficient support for, or outright barriers to, our childhood mining efforts, can they help us, now as adults, to dig up and polish to a gleam the 7 Childhood Treasures that enable a successful life full of purpose and joy?

Having just returned from my biannual family reunion, I believe I can answer my own question with a resounding yes! Putting on my cherished "side" hat of Anthropology (my 2nd major, paired with Child Development and a minor in Psychology), I begin with a definition. In fact, I begin with three of the many definitions of family. According to Dictionary.com, family is all of these:

1. A basic social unit consisting of parents and their children, considered as a group, whether dwelling together or not
2. Any group of persons closely related by blood, as parents, children, uncles, aunts, and cousins
3. All those persons considered as descendants of a common progenitor

Observation of the ethnology at our family reunion made visible the intricacies of all three.
 
Following family definition #3, we are, every one of us (60-ish in attendance this year), descendants of the same two hardy Kansans born around 1870, Abraham Lincoln Scott and Mary Effie Arnold Scott. Born at their farm known as Shady Lane, my grandfather, Ralph Lincoln, was among Abraham and Mary Effie's six children. At another Kansas farm, in 1925, my father was born the middle of Ralph's and Ninan's five boys.

These parents, five sons and, later, five in-law wives produced an example of #2, including my generation of first cousins, numbering 19. Then, within that extended family, there is my #1 family, a "nuclear" unit of 7, though we no longer dwell together:  father dead, mother living a long, happy retirement in the hometown, siblings spread around the Midwest and barely-South.

So, in this nuclear family where I didn't securely mine my treasure chest full of potential, is there help for me now? You bet your bippy! And also in families #2 and #3.

First, my two siblings who attended the reunion gave me a chance to polish up all the Treasures I've mined these past 30+ years of recovery. Gone, when we get together, are the old "Scott Family Theater" plays. I no longer fall back behind my childhood mask of protection, playing the roles I learned in our childhood dramas. I no longer tell the family lies or keep the family secrets. I am who I am with my brothers. I speak about what I see and feel, experience and think, hope and pray. They love me for it and support me in my authenticity. All my Childhood Treasures get polished up as we find ways to bring our authentic selves into new adult relationships that build on the strengths of 60+ years together.

Then, in family #2, I get the chance to observe the parallel universes of my cousins' lives. All of us are similar in age bands, from the first cousins' first births in the late 1940s-50, to those in 51-52, then 53-54...down we went...cousins of approximately the same age in little stair steps across the threads of most of the five brothers' families. My two sisters and I from the Kansas City suburbs are the same ages as three sister-cousins who grew up less than 20 miles from our grandparents' farm. All five sibs in my family are about the same age as a family of five of our cousins who grew up in Wichita.

These cousins' sibling relationships were shaped by the some of the same social and all the historic forces that shaped me and my siblings, and we were all influenced by the same extended family structure. Yet, each of their nuclear families is unique; each set of internal relationships grew out of their  individual and group responses to the glacial and seismic forces at work among each of their nuclear groups. When we all gather, I get to witness and learn from all the permutations and possibilities of how the Treasures were mined in this larger family. For example, how went the mining of Trust across these five family lines? I get to see the adult outcomes of families in which Trust was stronger, more stable than in mine. I get to see where the boundaries of Independence were never formed....

And what of the #3 family? The biannual gatherings from this prolific line of Abraham's and Mary Effie's progeny once numbered close to 200, at reunions held in the 1990s. Alas, the march of time takes its toll on our numbers at one end of the age range...but the babies keep coming.

Here's what I saw this time at the reunion. The hard edges of the rocky Kansas prairie are being smoothed out of my Capital-F Family. The subset attending this year represented the hundreds of still-living descendants--with their various in-laws and out-laws--of my great-grandparents, across five generations now, heading into a sixth. What I see is that we are more diverse in appearance now, as well as demeanor. The strong genetic code that planted its "Scott Male" flag on faces down through the first three generations and, even, into my own first-cousins band, is fading away in the next generations down. The stern parenting that went with those stern visages has also softened. Values for enforcing obedience and hard work have evolved into values for love and connection.

We change and grow as individuals, if we let ourselves. Families change and grow, too, if they let themselves. At its essence, the work of mining the 7 Childhood Treasures is a family affair your whole life long. Even the nuclear family, where that work maybe went somewhat awry in your childhood, may become a place where the mining work can begin again.

As we change, relationships with siblings and parents change. We can find new allies there in that nuclear original, and maybe in the extended family, too. Where once there were walls and fences, there can now be shared pastures. Where there once seemed to be division and separation, competition and conflict, there can be union.

And that family union is just one of many reason to mine those Treasures.