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Thursday, March 28 2024
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In the name of love, you do not have to love your family above yourself

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“You do not have to love your family, if you are an adult by law, and find it unhealthy, unpleasing and intolerant. You do have the right to move on for the sake of your own future,” says Deepshikha Dhankhar in this thought provoking article that goes against our learnt ethos…

Let’s face it. Digital media has brainwashed us all with the idea of a perfect, happy family. Is there one? You wonder every time you see those happy faces cuddling, hugging, and teasing. Maybe there is one, but do you have to love one if you don’t agree? You don’t!

We are told to ‘stick’ to our family if we want to succeed, always have our elders’ blessings, and never miss a festival. Why? Because we are conditioned to think that we are crippled if we are not bathing in the shadow of our family at least once or twice a year. And that’s what we also teach our kids. As victims of victims, we have been handing down all the wrong information about family, in short, we don’t know what to say when it comes to some unexpected events in the family, so we justify everything by saying “It’s your family and none is perfect.”

Sure, family provides a lot more than just a gathering of few members who choose or rather were chosen to live together. However, that’s not all. There are many layers running underneath the conscious of each and every person who is a part of that very family. Every one’s needs, values, emotions, intelligence, behaviour is different than every other member of the family, and yet they all choose to continue living together. Why? Family!

We have been seeing and saying it all wrong

The very definition of family is not a group gathering where they share success and hardly any failures. Whether you take modern families or traditional ones, there are only a handful of them that feel failures should equally be a part of family discussions at the dinner table. Most children will remember from their childhood that at sharp 9 PM where they were scared to eat a single morsel of food, they were too uncomfortable to have ‘the’ conversation, “why are your grades low? Why was I called to school? Who was that boy/girl? Did you steal? Did you fake my signature?” There are hardly any times when these issues, if we choose to call them so, were discussed with a positive mind set. And children were just raised to believe that that’s how it works in a family, that’s how ones family dynamics are supposed to be.

The disjointed joint effort

Especially in India, it is quite common to live in a joint family, not because they love to have fun, stay, eat under one roof but because they are ‘family’! But what about those people you did not like from your extended family? What about the times you did not want to tolerate the behaviour of your uncle or aunt, the food you were forced to eat by your chauvinistic grandfather, and the times you were witness to your grandmother making it difficult for your mother to survive one more second in the house? It all goes un-noticed under the pretext of family and eventually gives a very wrong idea about the whole definition of a family.

Sure, a lot of times this very family gives you a sense of security, support, and togetherness, however, we need to understand the weight of these emotions as compared to the not-so-talked-about ones the next time we suggest someone, you should do this for your family!

Real family

The very reason someone has even coined this word is the beginning of a disjointed, unhealthy structure we all call family. A family is a family, how can there be two kinds, real and unreal? It signifies the urgency that someone felt that needed to be addressed when he/she felt like family somewhere else and called it real. The whole structure of a family has been re-invented many times since the ages but there has been hardly any time when someone has actually stopped and told someone, “you do not have to love your family.” Because the truth is, you do not. Not when you are unhappy, your privacy is breached, you are forced to witness abuse, emotional or physical, you are stopped from pursuing basic education and dreams, you are manipulated, kept away from your close friends, threatened, and abused in any manner. Under any of these and similar circumstances, one does not need to see another sun. But doesn’t it take us to have experiences beyond our threshold when we finally decide to move away?

A healthy balance

Just like you seek balance in work, relationships, holidays, spirituality, personal care, etc, in the same manner it is important to understand and be aware of a healthy balance of doses you get in the name of family. A lot of us are happy children who grew up in a totally safe and loving environment but a lot of us are not. In that case, one should not be taught to stick to the family and stop looking out for oneself. Instead, one should stand up for their own needs and start saying no to any unpleasing circumstances that they think they should not have been subjected to in the first place. If that really is a family which cares enough, these unhealthy circumstances will stop or will have a solution to, but if not, then you know you have got to stop loving it.

Unhealthy relationships, broken self

If our family, environment was not right in the first place, how can anyone expect us to be a mature adult handling all the relationships with high self-esteem and a sense of self? These same adults then learn to stick to unhealthy relationships, habits, patterns, and carry a very broke self for the rest of their life because that’s what they were taught, “stick to your family no matter what.” We have misinterpreted the ‘no matter what’ part and that has taken a very ugly turn in a lot of lives.

You do not have to love your family, if you are an adult by law, and find it unhealthy, unpleasing and intolerant. You do have the right to move on for the sake of your own future. A family is supposed to be a support structure come what may, not a forceful execution of one in the name of sticking together.

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