Jul 21, 2008

Family - Rebound

I was reading my friend Katty's blog, "Dragonfly" (such a cool name!!) and I found this very interesting article about "Families". For a few seconds there I thought in posting this entry in Spanish, in clear answer to my friend, but Spanish is an alien language for me, even though it is my second mother tongue or maybe my "father tongue" if such exists.  Ironically, it's the language I speak and write the best, but I'm working hard to make my real mother tongue superior. Anyway, set aside from my linguistic preferences, I decided to respect the general line of this blog and keep it in English.  Now, I should be brutaly honest and admit that I do not understand the actual context of the entry since I have no idea what's going on in Ecuador and what's this thing about the "types of families".  The last time I heard about "types of families" was in the Alliance Française when we were made learn about the types of families that exist in France. Composed, monoparental, traditional... yadda-yadda-yadda... Honestly, I have no idea why the Government has to get tangled into what kinds of families are out there, unless they are going to give them some kind of support, or help them somehow without giving place to prejudices and unfair treatment.

As I read my friend's entry, I realized there were people defending the monoparental families, the families composed by grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and nieces/nephews and so on, but some other important families were left behind. I'll start with my "bagde" case, the homosexual families. If a woman alone can raise a kid, or a man alone can raise a kid, why can't two men or two women? I myself had doubts, and I feared that kids that did not have both roles female and male in their family life would grow up alienated by the not represented role, but that would go not only to the gay parents, but also to the single parents as well. It is my personal doubt, my unfundamented believe, but does someone had actually made a study on the case? An objective, scientific study of the case? Not to my knowledge. So who am I to judge them? Who si anyone to do so? How many straight parents, married straight, church going parents produce the most fucked up kids? Lets not go too far: remember the case of thge Internet Hoax? There where a girl, Megan Meier killed herself because she thought that this guy, Josh hated her, and so a big chunk of the MySpace cyberverse? There you go: one mom, one dad and one fucking fuxked up girl who commited suicide, based basically on really, really low sef-esteem. Shit, that chick's sel-esteem was so low, she took the Bottom-Esteem title from Daria! Recently a daddy, who has a wife (so there was a mommy and a daddy) left his six month child in the car all day and the baby died. Daddy forgot the baby. Oh, but I guess it was okay, because the kid was some "surplus kid" from Russia, so he was already excess baggage, right? But, wait, exactly the same happened also in France. Daddy went to work and kinda forgot to leave the baby at the Daycare and so the baby died in the car. This Daddy was married to the Mommy of the baby.

Straight couples can have a family and they "create" the family, regardless of how adequate they are for the task. Do you think that the right sexual orientation and a legal and religious paper declaring a bondig makes the family perfect? Is that all it takes to make a family? No wonder so many fucked up people is walking around.

But let's step down of the gay issues for five seconds. What about familes that are not tied by blood? What about when the kids are raised by their godparents? What about when the kids are raised by an older, adult friend? and why does the family has to be composed by "kids and grown ups" or people with generational differences? If, by some reason, I decided to go live with a friend of mine and we take care of each other, no romantic relationship in the mix straight or gay (my friend could be girl or boy), don't we make a family? And I don't have to live with them, as it is, just by caring for my friends, loving them, being attentive to their needs, always ready to help, knowing that they love me and will do what's in their power to aid me when I need help, doesn't that make us a family?

I will not give names, but how many families do we know where the friends are more family that the blood family?

If you ask me, there are two kinds of family: the blood family and the emotional family. They can be one and the same, or maybe the emotional family is bigger than the blood family, or the blood family bigger than the emotional one... whetever. I don't know what do you think, but I believe that the important one is the emotional family. (Though I still place a lot of weight on my blood family for personal reasons...)

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