Family

 

I love this, it appeals to my sense of the ridiculous and desirable.

And speaking of ridiculous, I mentioned before how my siblings and I Zoom every Sunday - or Monday, depending on schedules. We have a 7th anniversary coming up. All of us have a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, often ending in helpless laughter. A rare gift. Yesterday was one of those days.

The thing is, we are often asked what on earth we talk about for 3 hours. And we talked about that yesterday. There is no answer, as we are equally baffled as to how to translate our ridiculous conversations for a wider audience. Particularly the humour of our vivid imaginations.

Yesterday, for instance, for a while, it was the death of Jim Bakker, that horrific evangelistic preacher in the US who scammed and crimed his way through millions of dollars from his susceptible worshippers. 

We invented our own scammy religion (we're all atheists) and one of my brothers went off camera for a while and came back dressed as a priest. It took off from there. I know, we're all absolutely barking mad.

But I have found that over these seven years, we are more open and honest with each other after troubling childhoods. It's as if we're now having the freedom to recapture those years and be just as idiotic and creative and funny as we would have been back then if we were allowed. 

We recognise our closeness for the gift it is. And yes, it took some doing as there was a complete lack of trust between us for many years. "Rats in the attic" was how one brother described it. It began with tiny cracks in our self-protective shells and took off from there.

As we slowly took down these barriers, we stopped self-censoring. This became truly helpful when three of us were having health challenges; it was comforting to get daily messages of support and love when we had to undergo tests and in one case, serious operations. 

All of us, way back when.

I recognize how rare this is; I see fractured families of origin everywhere, even in my own small one with an estranged daughter living in the UK. It takes some work given an opportunity and in my case, being the eldest, I found that opening myself up to anticipated judgement proved to be the exact opposite. And lit the lamp for everyone else.

It all begins with honesty and empathy.