What kind of solar system is your family?
Some families are a perfectly stable little group of planets orbiting a happy warm sun, some are filled with gas giants and ice planets, others are full of comets with eccentric orbits that blaze brightly for a short time and then disappear. Some families have a binary star at their center, others a black hole. Some are young and full of energetic interactions, others have succumbed to entropy over time.
What kind of solar system is your family?
My wife and I are a few days removed from a relatively-short Christmas trip to Santa Barbara to see some of my in-laws as well as our daughter. This trip was also to celebrate a new beginning for my aging father in law, having recently moved from his house in the Texas Hill Country to a much more livable apartment in Goleta. Before we left we saw our son for the first time in awhile after a previous upset flung us apart.
The whole trip reminded me of the gravitational pull of family relationships. We are tidally locked to different parts of our familial solar system, in an orbit that periodically pulls us close until the momentum of our lives - or a collision with other parts of the family - flings us back out on our own.
I have a cousin who reached out after almost forty years, her son having asked her who this close match was on AncestryDNA. She has been estranged from her parents and sister for that whole time, having fallen out with them as a younger woman. She now has a family of her own with a grandchild. My father-in-law has been estranged from his brother for decades, I think for similar reasons. Sometimes the gravitational attraction of our little solar systems isn’t enough to maintain stable orbits. There are collisions and mass is ejected, never to return.
“Gravitational attraction” in this family-as-solar-system model is more than just love, although that’s a big part of it. Some return to family for the familiarity, like eating comfort food. We hold on to those memories as nostalgia for a childhood that was simpler and safer. Some use it to reinforce who they are, returning to the language and behaviors of their family as a way to refresh their worldview and image of self. Others return to family to try and resolve the open loop of needing to live a life of their own with concerns and family and friends of their own thousands of miles away. All of those things jangle around in my head when I’m with my extended family.
As wonderful as they can be, our little family solar systems are also complex and difficult. I’ve written before about the impact of today’s extended families who are geographically distant and want to remain self-sufficient longer into life. It takes extra gravitational pull - by nurturing relationships, keeping doors open even when we want to slam them shut, keeping traditions alive - to keep familial orbits stable when people are close together, let alone when they are far apart.
Perhaps the question is not “What kind of solar system is your family?”, rather it is “How strong is the pull of gravity in your family solar system?”.