Never Walked In High Heels

Over the past five years the word “community” has gotten a terrible name. We talk about community programs and community organizers. Not entirely sure what either name truly means. Grants for everything possible to encourage community living, art that is reflective of a certain community and encouraging projects that will help a community grow. With all this pressure to think of people as communities one thing is for sure, a genuine community is extraordinarily rare.

Just about every major religion stresses the importance of community. Sharing your life amongst other people, your frustrations, conflicts, sadness and joy keeps living in perspective. The world becomes bigger than just you, yourself and your family. There is genuine concern for others that you share your life with and from those who share their lives with you, even without the binding of blood. As far back as anyone can remember, humans were meant to be communal people. Trusting each other, relying on shared resources and even conflicts in order to lead to the betterment of the whole. Living this way means that people know your problems, your strengths and weaknesses, every annoying and gentle part of you. Best of all though, the people you surround yourself with, over time, really grow to know you.

Many say that in the modern world we no longer need to be dependent on other people. But, this is not true. Perhaps physically it is absolutely right, most people can survive working from home and ordering groceries from the Tesco online store. Their food and the necessities of daily living will be supplied. I myself could not survive in such a manner, but of course, I am the exception and not the rule. But even if I could physically, be independent enough to cook my own meals, mind my own house, keep up with a job by living at home. I don’t think I could live, I would survive certainly, but looking at my life now the problems seem overwhelming. The only way to survive this burden is by sharing it with others. The truth is, mentally and emotionally I need to be part of a group of people who are willing to love me, put up with me unconditionally and even chastise me when I’m wrong. I’m not looking for parents so much as I am looking for someone to share my life with.

Of course within the past three years, I don’t think amidst all the craziness I would have been able to get by without the community that I can now recognize and find myself in. This of course might be the absurdity in organizations, grants and governing bodies trying everything possible to jam a community down the throats of its constituents. A group of people living together and relying on each other happens without most of us realizing it. That’s when sharing lives becomes a genuine and easy experience. Of course this means making a sacrifice. Admitting that my life is out of control and going absolutely crazy means that I can no longer lie to myself. It means that people hold me accountable to my actions towards myself, towards them and towards their families, so that I might grow, learn and thrive in a way that I may not be able to if I had all my needs met yet still insisted on living in solitary confinement. It means of course we grate on each other. But, overall, we have formed a community without trying.

There is an ongoing joke I have among my friends that one day I walked into my flat only to find that there was someone uninvited in my kitchen, another one using my internet and a third one lying down in my bedroom. During this discovery a fourth one came over explaining that his shower was broken and was only putting out cold water, wondering if he could use mine. I am lucky to have fallen into a community with women who bake every Saturday and men who drop by when they are in need of the internet or have found out that I have a broken toilet. It does mean that I have made a sacrifice and that the quiet moments are rare. I am challenged continually by the people who surround me, even on the days I would like to go home and avoid everyone. But this assures me that within my community not only do I never have the benefits of an empty house, I will never have the downfall of an empty life.

There is something immensely pleasing about running under the golden trees of autumn and watching the leaves fall. It is almost like the entire world for a moment, is showing off and becoming the absolute best that it can be. Often in the early evenings I take long walks and peer into the windows of warmly lit rooms. Inevitably, one sees families gathered around tables either doing homework or sitting down to dinner and on a particular November night; even though I am half way around the world I am reminded that this is the season to stop and give thanks, no matter where you are from, for the bounty that you receive either in the form of friends and loved ones who surround you or simply having food on your table.

Somehow Thanksgiving is always less precious than it’s stressed out holiday cousin of Christmas. You don’t hear over and over about the perfect Thanksgiving, the magical thanksgiving from childhood you always remember. Instead much of the family stress of making a day into some sort of idealized Rockwell disappears. We need only do one thing, and that is to be thankful, and while it should be the simplest thing to do, inevitably…it is not.

I sometimes think that Hallmark and other card companies must be incredibly frustrated with the holiday. They are still, despite their best efforts, unable to turn it into a manufactured reason to make money and increase their capital. There is no fairy or elf that comes along to sprinkle dust on you in the middle of the night and make you thankful for all you have been fortunate enough to receive. An image of such a creature inevitably sets me off laughing as he is somehow unimaginable. One being thankful is one action that no one can force upon you, nor can they magically impose a feeling of gratitude without your effort. Thankfulness is a choice, you choose to be thankful where you are and where you choose to be.

The duty of the holiday or the reason for the holiday is that an individual must be thankful for something, anything, and to someone. It could be that you are thankful to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for creating International Talk Like a Pirate Day; or you could be thankful to your mother because even though you are at the age of 45, she is still willing to clean you room. Be thankful to Buddha for laughing, or Christ for being crucified. What you are thankful for is immaterial. In this way the holiday is not distinctly religious, nor is it distinctly American as some social critics claim. Surely other cultures have much to be thankful for and find their own way to express gratitude to both entities or for such items. If one is unable to decide a single thing to be grateful for, then inevitably the very value of life comes into question.

A few years ago I shared Thanksgiving with a friend who absolutely dreaded the holiday. She insisted that it just seemed like pre-gaming before Christmas and one should simply celebrate the great holidays in December, leaving November to stand on its own. It’s easy to see this holiday as completely pointless; there are no gifts, there is no grand finale, and for the exception of the Macy’s Parade there is no common experience that unites the entire country together. Each family sits down to a dinner that is uniquely their own, be it a stuffed turkey and homemade cranberry sauce or macaroni and cheese. We spend time thanking each other because that is in many ways the most expensive currency we have and yet it is universal and our freedom to choose how those twenty four hours can illustrate our attitude about the things in life we treasure. If we cannot take time on such a day to be thankful, to stop and listen regardless of what goals are unmet and what desires we have that have been lost. What makes us think that we will ever be ready to receive the gifts of Christmas?

One of my best friends called me in absolute tears the other day. Two of her younger sister’s, both unmarried, are now in their second trimester. Nobody else in the family was aware that they were pregnant until this week. Theirs is a Christian family devoted to rescuing children from troubled situations. Both my friend and her mother have actively devoted their professional careers to stopping the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in separate ways. Her mother is an epidemiologist, my friend, a humanitarian worker that focuses on getting young women off the streets and out of prostitution, by showing them their value does not merely lie with their talents in bed. But for both of these women, their immediate reaction became a circumstantial symptom of abject failure.

Many families, particularly in more faith-based circles consider it embarrassing or even representative of a familial breakdown when a daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock. And it does evoke whispers among the people who surround that family, but it’s by no means the absolute worst thing that a child can do. Yet, the expectant grandparents often blush at how others will judge them rather than focusing their effort on creating the best family situation possible for the baby to come. I’m not saying that my friend’s family have fallen victim to this fallacy, but I have seen other families in the exact same situation do exactly that.

There is overall, a negative reaction within a family that bases its foundation in the Christian faith when an occurrence like this arises. There is a persistent fear amongst such people that the actions of their adult children somehow imply people are bad parents. Often I have seen parents threaten and even out right disown their children as well as their future grandchildren as the pregnancy in their eyes is the ultimate slap in the face to their child raising skills. Some of the most unchristian qualities actually come from those doing the disowning rather than those being disowned. However, what reflects worse on parenting skills in expecting grandparents refusing love to the expecting mother and child? Surely this is less of a Christian attitude than the act of getting pregnant ever was.

It is the unexpected events in life that cause us to drop our own masks of respectability. In truth, as a society, Christians today seem to care more about how other’s struggles can reflect poorly on them than what they can do to minimize struggling for any and all. When has it ever been morally responsible to even care about what the outside world thinks? Even in the most conservative families, public approval should never act as a barometer for actions or as a means to test what is morally right.

We all know somehow that there is a right and wrong, though we disagree on what exactly the nature of that division is, no one ever says, “I am going to go ahead and do the absolute wrong thing and make my life miserable as a result.” But the best among us sometimes set out to be the least controversial which creates almost a vacuum of morality. The fact that something makes waves doesn’t illustrate the fact that it is wrong and if someone disagrees or turns their nose up at your willingness to create a little trouble in the name of morality, chances are that person isn’t worth the effort it would take to appease them.

I had a friend who became unexpectedly pregnant in between her junior and senior year at university. I was a year above her and had no idea of the situation until I was sent a picture of the child shortly after it was born. It was beautiful but shocking to think that a friend of mine was now able to replicate herself. She was ahead in her class credit, so took a semester off to go through the pregnancy as well as completing summer school the summer before her graduation. She graduated on time and realistically with a better plan than any of us had at the time we walked across the stage. Another friend of mine within three weeks of each other discovered that two of her sisters had also become pregnant out of wedlock. Her family is extremely conservative and were shocked as well as embarrassed by the entire situation. The amount of angst and anger which was brought on as a result of two new babies was in many ways surprising and not particularly loving.

The thing about families is it’s become a cliché; there is no such thing as a “normal” family. However to take it a step further, families in order to function (as opposed to simply being normal) are based around forgiveness. Normal people find it very difficult to turn the other cheek and move on. But unlike what most people would do given the chance, functional families are able to react with more love to these sort of situations and problems simply because if you are in a family together, you are stuck with each other for the rest of your lives. Run away as far as possible and they are still genetically connected to you so you might as well get used to it and recognize that their faults are probably pretty similar to your own, or at the very least, as difficult for other people to handle.

The love of families represents the type of love and commitment, as well as sacrifice, we are supposed to show to just about everyone else in the world. But by nature you are dedicated to finding the very best for your family; this is natural instinct. I’ve known families who moved into houses without furniture just so there children could attend a particularly brilliant school district. The stories abound about mothers who discover that their children are violin prodigies and then take night shifts in order to pay for lessons which cost a days wages.

There are no normal families. Ideally, we should be able to find a balance of what is good for the people that are blood related to us, whether it be stretching our boundaries of forgiveness to accept the prodigal son back one more time or simply forgetting about the fact that he didn’t take the trash out yet again. We have to learn to afford each others grace and hopefully begin to expand that talent of giving grace out into other parts of the world until other people who aren’t necessarily related to you by blood receive that type of love and sacrifice from you. A family teaches us to accept and tolerate people as they are. Whereas we would normally walk away from friends who hurt us in the same way our family does, there is no escaping the memories of growing up together and the good times.

When I told someone of my friends original plan to have the baby and then continue on with her job in the middle-east while being a single mother and waiting for the father to get out of medical school, they replied “That sounds like a stable solution, but it’s still a bizarre and improper way to start a family.” And in a way, they are right. It is bizarre and it doesn’t go by traditions, but in the end, what we accept from our loved ones is exactly that: bizarre and unexpected. One might as well acknowledge its strangeness at the start of establishing a family.

This week I’ve been reading about an old friend and her family history. In recent months this author has become a substitute grandmother, filling me in with all sorts of wisdom, platitudes, and calming truths that I was never given. She tells in her books about her own family, how her great grandmother was the daughter of the ambassador to Spain, and grew up in the Spanish courts. How her parents were reporters, following news stories wherever they could in the days of WWI. They were citizens, soldiers, and those who enlisted bravely. Women who knew how to use a sword and run a house at the same time.

And then there’s my family. We’re from mid-America, poor, and relatively suburban. Well, not really suburban I suppose, though it seems particularly uneventful to me. I’m pretty sure that a member of the family or two had a run in with the law. We have no heirlooms that I know of. My grandparent’s basement is legendary for holding things but nothing really of any value. And they know that most people when they grow up and become independent adults, they choose to become close to their family. They leave for a while and then return, settling down and starting a family of their own. But doing that was never really in my mind when I embarked on adulthood.

They say that a family is equal to your roots and that having such people in your life will guide you as well as make you grow tall and strong. But, what if the roots you come from don’t run particularly deep? Or you don’t necessarily want to go in the direction that they’re going? What then? To what extent is blood thicker than water? And does this really mean anything? Are you necessarily bound to any family just because your genetic code is similar in some way?

In college, I was the only girl in my dormitory who didn’t come from what could easily be termed as “old money.” Lots of girls had monograms engraved on their tote bags or jackets with family shields pinned on them; their emblems and symbols, histories and romances ran deep. So deep that it was nearly legendary. And then there was me. It wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it was surprising that people even existed who treasured their bloodline so much. All of this (…?), the weight of standing on your ancestor’s shoulders seemed to be the only way to get anywhere in a new southern society.

For those of us who lack an ancient family tree that’s knotted and crooked in some places, although strong and formidable, if we don’t have such roots, do we stand alone? My family can be considered small and when I am away from them in the United Kingdom, holidays can be rough. It is during this time that everyone goes to their family. But, after several years I have learned that a family is made, created almost, rather than genetically passed down. I find myself in the UK with people who are closer to me than cousins and young women who have become my sisters within the past several years. Because like any transplant, we go down, digging our own roots and holding on to whatever we possibly can. Once we’re a little bit stable, we reach out and make our own new family.