The stories we tell about our families not only make sense of the experiences we have, they also define the way we live in the world. When we are growing up, we simply accept our family stories. We don’t question whether or not they are anomalous, we just think that every family has a similar story. One of the stories that I knew from my earliest childhood was that family is forever. My father used to say, on many occasions, “You can’t resign from a family.” We understood that we were equally parts of my father’s family - with all of his brothers and his one sister and all of their spouses and children and of my mother’s family, with her sisters, their husbands and children. As we got older, we learned of families where estrangements had occurred, but by then the rule was set. Some of my relatives were very different from other members of our family. My dad would say, “We don’t get to pick the people in our family. We just have to get along with them.” I know now that his message was partly to himself. There were some relationships within the extended family that weren’t natural to him. He had to work to get along with uncles who had different values, different goals and different ways of doing things than he did. I can remember him rolling his eyes at cobbled up repairs with wire and improper parts, when he would have gotten the right parts and put the thing together correctly. My father hated driving a vehicle that hadn’t been properly maintained. My uncles made it a way of life.

Another family story that was ingrained into me for all of my life is that people come into families in different ways, but we are all one family. My parents tried to have children without success for years. They ended up adopting two girls. Then they had three children born to them. Later two more boys were adopted. It was an absolute in our family that adopted children were every bit as “real” as those who were born into the family. Family included all equally and no distinctions were to be made between children who were adopted and those who were born into the family.

Those stories have played themselves out in my life as an adult. Our children grew up knowing that they belonged to both Susan’s family and to mine. When relationships were strained - and they have been strained - between siblings or their partners, we just worked harder at keeping in relationship. I found myself repeating my father’s statements; “You can’t resign from a family.” And there are two children in our immediate family: one born to us the other adopted. They are equally completely our children.

What I realize now is that other families have other stories. Some families know the story, “A son is a son until he meets his wife, but a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.” In some families, it is the norm for the new family formed by a marriage to be more tightly incorporated into one of the existing families than the other. Instead of alternating holiday visits, these families form tight bonds with one part of the family and separate from another part.

In fact, some family stories include tension in the process of forming the new family. A young man marries over the objections of his parents and the family story reports that this is a good thing. Choosing love over family is part of the definition of adulthood. Separating from the family of origin is accompanied with tension and disagreement. In such families, children grow up looking for difference and opportunity to make that separation.

There are families whose stories include divorce and the sense that romantic love cannot be trusted.

In many families, love is seen as a power that is beyond human control. “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives” - another of my father’s favorite aphorisms - is applied to the choice of husband or wife. “It was love at first sight” is another way of saying that romantic love renders one without power. It is a force that cannot be controlled.

My mother’s telling of her romance with my father was much more rational. “I waited until I found the right man.” She had gone on a few dates in high school, but it wasn’t until after she had gone away to nursing school and left behind her small home town that she got serious about finding a husband. There were certain qualities that she wanted in a husband and she found them. That’s the way she told the story. I’m pretty sure that there was more to it than that. Their romance was rushed by my father’s enlistment in the Army Air Corps during World War II and she traveled alone to California to the wedding that took place in the home of an aunt and uncle with no members of either’s immediate family able to attend. But my parents never spoke of rush or risk or distance from family. Of course they got married in a family home. The fact that the minister was a family friend was given as a sign of the approval of my mother’s family for the marriage.

It isn’t just what happens, but also the stories we tell that make us who we are.

So when a friend divorces and remarries, I’m usually thrown by their decisions. When an adult estranges him or her self from their children or grandchildren, I can’t understand their decisions. When someone comes into my office asking for counsel about reconfigured families and extramarital affairs, I have to hide my shock and dismay. I forget that they are responding to a different set of stories. The scenarios they describe aren’t a part of my family narrative.

I realize that telling our family stories to our grandchildren may be one of the critical tasks of our lives. And that requires that we love not only the children of our own family, but the spouses they have chosen. We are all part of the same family. And you can’t resign from a family.

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