Blood is apparently thicker than water, but around these parts we tend to have heparin free-flowing.
Today, during the seemingly-right-on-schedule argument with The Ex, his chagrin was targeted toward me for referring to a close family friend, someone I consider to be integral to mine and Zoë’s every day, as family. I get it, his perspective that the people who you have traces of in your veins are family and others are friends and friends are not included automatically in family moments; I just choose to march to a different Glee skit.
I don’t see anything wrong with that, yet I remain aware that had I had a differing upbringing, I might feel in a way aligned with his part-time sentimentalism.
The problem I have with his idealism is that his family, the extended ones, are there for him only specifically when asked and for the most part, incommunicado the rest of the time. He has a relationship with his dad via email and occasional phone calls, refuses to be tied on the phone with his step family, doesn’t call his grandmother unless it’s in relation to his inheritance, didn’t really speak to his brother for all of the past couple of years, can go days without speaking to his mother even though they share a one-bedroom apartment, etc.
Family, to me, isn’t the brood you’re borne into knowing. They’re the ones that you are thicker than thieves with. The ones who will be on the phone with you late into the night, who will drop their life if it means coming to your side, the ones who get excited when it looks like you might be having yet another baby or wedding or boob job. They’re the people who care because they just do, not because a quote attributable to various sources testifies that they should.
My best friends are no less my sisters and brothers than my sisters and brother are, a maternal figure no less a mom than mine, simply because of DNA.
His back was crawling with it’s wrongisms, and he was obviously plagued with what he saw as a slight toward his family, but he didn’t understand my distinction. He doesn’t see the divide he’s helped to create, where there is an us, and a his, and a mine and hers – that Zoë may be the property of three families, simply because they’re such differing factions, all reporting under unique disciplines.
I won’t give up our mine and hers because quite frankly, I’m going to be selfish about it. I won’t remove the entitlement these figures have played out in our lives because we love them, they love us and we’re there for each other, whether that means for purely ventilation moments, to mash about and separate the Play-doh, or to gossip about what happened last week on Grey’s Anatomy and what new Dora DVD is coming out.
I won’t subscribe to his belief that his is also mine and Zoë’s and mine should have more prominence, because quite frankly, I don’t want the kind of family that doesn’t give a shit about me and by extension, us, enough to reach out an arm despite pasts or lack thereof.
I won’t remove his fantasy of ours, because I think he’s holding onto the notion that the three of us, me, him and Zoë, are a family. I think that’s the only illusion that keeps him from sinking.
On second thought, maybe that’s what he needs to hear – that I don’t consider him my family because he’s Zoë’s daddy, not a father, not a husband or a boyfriend or even, most of the time, a friend. He can’t be included in the familial philosophy that I hold so tight to for one simple reason: he fails all of the tests that our true family aces.
It’s all semantics, because I’m never going to tell him that unless it’s within a safe environment, and when it comes to him and his ability to take and hurt and suffer for and in front of others, there’s no such thing as a safe place.
Today, I told him that he needed to start to take on more responsibility, that we should be moving toward a cohesive joint parenting plan, because if she was going to have both of us, she deserved the benefits and drawbacks to both of us equally.
He had nothing to say, of course, because he was still thinking about being insulted and a victim of my words.
I’m just so tired. You know?
