There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.

In the Midwest, there’s a more intense and personal version of all of this. I expect it shows up elsewhere, but the subtext-based communication and tendency to avoid direct conflict that people in the Midwest are known for tends to exacerbate the problem. Hereabouts, the default meaning of family (primarily people biologically related to you) tends to include individuals or other small families that have forged close emotional bonds with multiple members of the core biological family unit. Typically refered to as “family friends,” these people are often eventually upgraded to full family members, including invitations to the various family events that probably won’t overlap with the other family’s events, which usually means things like family reunions, birthday parties, and more social-based parties (like graduation or block parties). All of these invitations, including the subtextual invitation to become a part of the larger family unit, are supposed to be an honor. Most of the time, they are.

Unfortunately, the subtext and potential for nastiness inherent therein can sometimes turn these things into a source of judgment. Sometimes, a person gets invited to join a family event (usually one tied to a holiday, in this case) out of pity, the subtext there being that no one else wanted them around, so your family will take them in. It is, unfortunately, difficult to tell those sort of invitations apart from the ones that come from a place of genuine warmth and care, even when you’ve spent your entire life living in the Midwest. It is a common occurrence for someone with only pity or judgment in their heart to use an intermediary (usually the person who is already friends with this unrelated party) to extend the invitation so that there is no trace of the original subtext. Usually, the only way to tell is if you’ve gotten to know the family beforehand, in other circumstances, and learned that you can trust them not to be talking about you and how alone you’ll be over the holidays behind your back.

Beyond that, things tend to vary depending on your specific family. Some are more tolerant of “prodigal children” than others. Some are willing to bury anything in order to keep their family looking perfect to any outside observers (usually family friends and non-biological family members including in-laws, which still frequenly count as “outside” despite how deep into the family hierarchy they’ve been brought). Some are warm and accepting and will take you as you are. Not all of these people are bad or acting out of a desire to cause harm, there’s just a lot of them who haven’t really done the work to examine what about their past familial relationships might be negatively impacting their current familial relationships. Nothing like a giant, expansive family for perpetuating cycles of abuse.

This might paint a bitter picture of something I wrote extensively about yesterday, but it’s an odd place to be in, these days. As someone without the trappings of family, I frequently find myself, at best, missing out on social events. At worst, I find myself judged and rejected for not having a family. There is little that is worse than, after years of enduring emotional abuse and the never-ending demands of people who refuse to believe they’re wrong, finally removing people from your life only to realize that the entire social internet is, for two a weeks per parent per year, convinced that you’ve done the wrong thing by removing horrible people from your life. Most people do not write or post those things from a place of judgment, but it is difficult to not feel judged when everyone is sharing the message that your parents did their best and deserve forgiveness for whatever wrongs they might have done. It is difficult to enjoy the winter holidays when every movie about difficult family relationships over the holidays ends with the family reconciling or the person who was wronged simply forgiving them. Hell, I’m still upset about how The Mitchells Vs. The Machines took a great example of a horrible family situation and made it clear that it was on the kids to fix things. There’s so many things wrong with that movie.

It is not forbidden to discuss the idea that maybe all families aren’t good and that maybe some families are bad, but it is still taboo. It is not a detail I lead with, most of the time. It is not a personal experience I ever share without establishing at least a moderate list of my family’s faults so that I can make it seem like the reasonable choice even in the face of all this cultural weight behind the importance of family. It is isolating, to the extent that the only person I feel like I can really talk to about this stuff is my sister, who is going through pretty much the same thing. She tends to have better luck with found family, though, than I’ve had. It’s not like I haven’t tried to build that, to find a way to measure up to even the more loose societal definitions of family, but even those tend to fail me. I did not have a mother figure or a father figure. I didn’t literally raise myself, but I did in the ways that matter most. Beyond the basics of survival, anyway (though I definitely wouldn’t have survived without plenty of my own work). I just haven’t had much success trying to build a found family and sometimes, in the face of the constant messaging about family being somehow fundamental to human nature, I wonder if I’m the one who is failing. It’s not like I’ve had experience being a part of a family beyond the complete subservience and acceptance of my lack of value that formed my relationship with my biological family. Maybe I’m just failing to fit where I’m supposed to.

Which is always the thought that shakes me out of it. I don’t want to be a part of a family that has a spot that I’m supposed to fit in. I’d rather have nothing than a family that doesn’t accept me for who I am. And while I may not have a whole family unit of those kinds of people, I have enough individuals who accept me that I don’t really need more. It just gets to me, sometimes. It is difficult not to feel like you’re missing out if you walk past a church and hear innumerable voices lifted in harmony. It is usually better, if you know you won’t like your experience, to move on, but it still feels like you’re letting go of something important when you do.