The Family...
Family. Wow, the family is a strange thing. I mean, not just mine, but, you know, families. They're... odd.
Take family love. We know that we're supposed to love our family, and we do, but at the same time we always say, with a less than subtle, figuratively crushed garlic wafting sledgehammer blow of a piquant hint of grim, wry irony, "You can choose your friends, you can choose your enemies, but you can't choose your family." Because we love them, but sometimes they aggravate us so much we hate them, and then we hate ourselves for hating them, so we hate them for making us hate ourselves... what the...?
I don't even think that "family" is that clear to us. Euripedes told us, "Blood's thicker than water," but where exactly is that blood? There is no doubt that the bindings of a family are incredibly powerful, for better or worse, but the family boundary changes day by day, generation by generation, culture by culture. Why is that? I mean, family's family, right? And yet, though we might think that we're really familiar with the family, that we know exactly what it is, it turns out that when you try to pin it down... Let me put it this way. It's a bit like nailing jelly: something never fits, or squirts away, none of it stays still, and in the end it's a futile endeavour resulting only in a vividly coloured sticky mess.
Dictionaries don't help
The online Merriam Webster dictionary has no less than 23 entries for family, and the definitions range from the mundane through bizarre to the frankly hilarious. Here's a sample:
- people or group of peoples regarded as deriving from a common stock
- a category ranking above a genus and below an order and usually comprising several to many genera
- a set of curves or surfaces whose equations differ only in parameters
- a unit of a crime syndicate
And
there's more. Not only is a family a crime syndicate, it turns out that
the word "family" derives (in a roundabout way) from the Latin
"famulus" meaning servant!
Ok, so I'm being really daft. Balmy. Just plain silly. Sure I know that family is a lot more simple than that! Obviously, it's just the people you're related to...
But, wait a minute... family is relatives? Argh! That doesn't explain anything! I reckon justabout every faith and theory says that there's a common human ancestor, right? So, duh, we're all related! Get that? Whatever way you cut it, we're all related! Ugh!
Ok then, what about famous families? Well if I try to think of families that are famous I can only come up with the Manson family - who weren't "related" and stabbed people - and the Mafia - who aren't related and stab their relatives - and then the Royal family - who are a bunch of inbred overprivileged buffoons who also aren't related and stabbed their relatives and everyone else given half a chance. Come on, they hardly stand as great ambassadors for notions of family values!
Ah, ptooey. I have a family. I have a wife, three daughters, a son, and a stepson, and you can get to meet them, in a virtual kind of way, in these pages. And there's me, and I suppose I'm in my family too.
Welcome to my family. We're all here. Probably.
