Family, Holidays, and Our Quiet Langage

My father has made it here, while my sister and brother-in-law have not. My mother and I prepared the house for their arrival, but were unprepared for foul weather and flight complications that slowed trips. Erin & Joe won't be getting here until Wednesday, three days later than they had planned. Such is the way of winter, flights, and frustrations.

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The company of family means playing card games, watching a movie here and there, conversational strolls, and shopping. My friends will attest that I do not often speak of my family, who have often been surprised that my father is around and that I have a brother and a sister. It is not that I deny or ignore or disregard my family, it is more that the reality of my family--even when it comes to conversing with the family--is a quiet one. Most of the weight of raising my siblings and I fell on my mother--which is not surprising--and to here we owe the willingness to see children become creative, insightful, and dedicated in our own ways and to our own degrees. Here on out, I will probably write and then delete, and the reconsider my words for just the aforementioned reasons.

What I mean to put into words here, I suppose, is that we all care for each other. Each of us shows our affection in different ways, with different skills and intentions, but to any clever observer, we each care very much for one another. As my siblings and I have left behind our adolescence, we have become more regular and out front with our hugs, kind words, and gift-giving. This, I would say, is a happy development in our camaraderie. It replaced a more, shall we say, aggressive manifestation of our bonds; my sister once left a hand-shaped bruise on my back and my brother once tackled me from behind just because he could not ignore a golden opportunity to do so. As I said, an improvement.

As for our parents, it is slightly more confusing and also somewhat similar. With time, we have learned to lovingly embrace and tolerate what we must; often taking what we can with genuine gratitude. My mother has always kept a space warm for her children and whatever company we bring into her home, even housing three young Gustavian women on choir tour for a few nights. I was not around, but I was sure to hear about it from all parties the subsequent months. Meanwhile, my globe-trotting father more often than not means well, but gets in the way of himself. If I could easily put into words how I relate to him, I would. On the other hand, I would not dare record how the rest of my family gets along and fails to get along with him; such is not my business nor my territory.

And that is one way to understand my family: business and territory. For the past few months, my mother and I have been able to share a good deal of territory. That territory has involved movies, TV shows, card games, dinners, walks, conversations and so on. Except under private, conversational situations, I would not share those experiences; they are our business. Similarly, I might joke about this or that episode with my brother or my father, but don't expect an exhortation or personal essay concerning them posted here. What I have mentioned thus far is long past and has been described in brief. That is, my family values discretion.

That, though, is not the note on which I mean to close. What I mean is that, despite the sometimes deceptive quiet of my family, we have spent years learning, interpreting, and speaking in a language all our own. That language is suffused with our own brand of reserved affection. In certain situations--the more extravagant or grievous, mostly--we become more verbose in our sentiments and our frustrations. More often than not, though, we are quietly exchanging glances, sly words, and happy recollections out of the range of our company. We hug good night when no one is looking, or rest our weight gently on another's shoulder, inquiring as we do so about the day, or catch a phone call and plan about the next expedition here or there. We speak a happy, quiet language, sometimes furtively slipped between the more common lines of day-to-day dialect. At the end of a long day, I know that and am thankful for it.