Posted by Elizabeth

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Families change.  No matter how good, bad, or average your own family is, the one thing you can count on is that, over time, family dynamics will shift.  Deaths and births bring families together, and tear them apart.  Marriages and divorces change the players and alter the rules by which our families operate. Perhaps it’s because I just spent 10 days with my family – the one I have by both biology and marriage – but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how my own family has been erased and rewritten by the hands of time.  I’m only 31, but my family – the faces, the routines, the traditions – looks nothing like it did just 10 years ago.  A large branch of my family tree snapped clean off when my mother died, the ragged remains resting limply on the ground for a number of years.  But from those remains grew a tender sapling, the family I married into, and I am grateful to have that appendage back.  Still, living thousands of miles from my relatives – our collective nuclear family is spread over three states and three countries – I rarely participate in family gatherings.  Any of the traditions that defined my growing up years are nonexistent.  And sometimes, especially around the holidays, that feeling is disconcerting.

When I flip through friend’s family photos, especially friends in my peer group, I am often struck by how unchanged their families are.  And I can’t help but feel a little envious when I see such cohesiveness incarnate.  There are rules, established at marriage, regarding where Christmases and Thanksgivings will be spent each year, from here to eternity.  Their family traditions are played upon the same stage year after year:  the cast, the costumes, and the sets largely unaltered.  Everyone memorized their script long ago and has polished their roles; they execute their parts effortlessly.  There are none of the frantic dress rehearsals, forgotten lines, or bouts of stage fright that I feel every year, as I madly dash around learning a new character for a new play, my life a seemingly endless series of limited engagements.  How, I wonder, will I ever learn my part if the script keeps changing?

But that is part of thrill, I suppose, of being a part of a family whose dynamics are not fixed.  There is no type casting because we all play a wide variety of roles from year to year.  If we didn’t like last year’s script then we throw it out and write a new one the next year.  And that script, I’ve learned, isn’t something that’s been written and handed to us; each year, we write the script as we go.  There are a lot of leaps of faith – without a prescribed plot, we often don’t know where the story is going until we get to the end, and that uncertainty from year to year sometimes creates panic, or at least a sense of disequilibrium.  For years I’ve been trying to carefully edit this messy script to create a sense of order.  For years I wanted nothing more than to create a series of rules and traditions that we would agree to adhere to from year to year, allowing each of us the opportunity to hone the roles we were cast in.  But you know what?  This year, I finally understood for the first time that that wouldn’t work for a family like ours.  It’s impossible to create a fixed game plan when the rules keep changing.  And rather than fighting it, I’m making a choice to embrace the uncertainty.  While I may never know a set series of time-honored traditions, I know I’ve been allowed to grow into whatever role I choose.

Which kind of family are you a part of?  Do you enact the same play year after year, or create a new one?  Which do you prefer?