I am sitting here in the school library, listening to this person in front of me grumble at his computer, his words are not censored by they way and I am finding it a bit distracting. Anyway, this is in response to Lina's post on her blog.
Stephanie said something to me the other day about growing up. She was asking my thoughts on a summer job somewhere in the Sierra Mountains, and I turned it down, with thoughts that I wanted to be in Seattle to be near to my family. She told me that I have to grow up sometime. Although I think it was in context to not living with mom and Doug, I took it to mean something more sinister, like living far from the immediate support of my family. The point I am trying to make isn't as evident as I would like it to be by now, but it is not that I am a big baby when it comes to cutting the apron strings. Yes, I love being around you guys and I wouldn't trade a summer with you guys for a summer in the mountains just to have the experience. I don't see the equal value in that.
Anyway, the point is that moving on is hard, and I think for me personally that factions of my family moving away from a central location where I can see them seems threatening to my idea of a family unit. Lina, I knew this is where you guys were heading. It doesn't come as a shock. But I am saddened too. I want you guys to have the lives you want. I wish you luck in finding a renter for you're house, for Nathan to find a great job, for the girls to have a fun time growing and learning, and mostly for you to find progress. I love you all very much.
PS: this guy is still grumbling.
11 comments:
You put that beautifully my dear daughter. I am having problems with the whole concept of kids even adult ones moving on. I am feeling so blue right now I can't even say the supportive things I know I should. I will get used to the idea....just not yet.
I love you Whitney. Mom
I agree Whitney. You do have the family connection. They did say only a couple of years. Maybe it will actually be that. I have empathy for your Mom. Having your grandchildrenn at a great distance from you changes the dynamics of sharing their lives. Of course it also changes your relationship with your adult children. Right now your Mom is sick and adding this very real loss to her might mean she needs more love and attention. We will all get used to Nathan and Lina and the girls not being present at our family events but that doesn't mean we will like it. You know how much Jared is missed. I'm still angry with my brother for leaving and moving to Arkansas. The only time he comes out here is if someone dies and he knew that when he left. Talking on the phone just doesn't replace sitting next to him over breakfast and chatting. It is a very jarring experience and I feel inept when my siblings leave me. That is my own selfishness, but I am a family person. I lived away from siblings and parents for 5 years..worst 5 years of my life emotionally. I missed so much. Including the birth of Tad and Nathan and Brandon and Jason and Crystal. You get the picture. People are very mobile these days but walking around Chelan, and Easter morning and the craziness of Halloween will not be the same, and our family Christmas in Seattle?? See I am selfish. I wish your brother and his family well, but I know there will be no time in the future for me to see them. I hope Lina finds what she is looking for in her childhood friend and the new adventure of moving to a new land. She's used to moving. They will be okay,and so will everyone else but it does take time to adjust to the change. I love you Whitney!!
Aunt Dee
hugging you right now. leave me and I'll kick your ... :) how is my girl?
Aunt Dee you summed up my feelings pretty well. I am selfish too. It will take time to get used to the idea, but if we try and find the silver lining, then it means we have an excuse to visit Utah and get to know another beautiful state. And maybe this will force us closer because we will have to deal with being apart. Or maybe it won't ...can't predict the future.
Wit,
It is a very fashionable idea amongst college age students to believe that traveling the world and moving away from your family constitutes "growing up." The irony, of course, is that almost all the kids who believe this simply transport their immature behavior from one locale to another, leading to the conclusion that, if one can get drunk and party in Paris, France, why the hell get drunk and party in Small Town, USA?
Any idiot on the street should be able to tell you this has nothing to do with growing up.
Growth, always, comes from the inside out. One does not need to travel to grow, nor need to move away from their family. And, in my experience, most people who move far away from their family regret it, even if they choose not to move back.
When someone is at the end of their life, pondering their final few hours, what is it that they regret? If you've ever had the chance to ask the dying, they all say the same thing. They don't regret not traveling, or the job they didn't take, or how they wish they'd made more money...they regret they did not have more time to spend with their family.
Go figure.
Ty
Right on TYLER!!!
Right on TYLER!!!
My immediate reaction is to say, well, I will send Nathan and the kids your way a few times a year if possible, so you won't feel like you have totally lost anyone.
But the truth is I know this is hard on you all. My Mother's four brothers arrived with their families about a year ago, after 28 years apart I didn't know what to expect. This is the first time in my life I have had anybody related to me around me. Their arrival has been the biggest dissapointment of my life. I thought we would finally belong to an extended group, we would finally feel as connected and rooted as everyone else we had ever know. No. They, like you all, in fact more so, had lived with each other and in the same little town their entire lives.
You cannot know what it is to have a soul full of very shallow dents, because you never stayed anywhere or near anyone long enough to become anything. To feel the constant pain of sudden inexplicable loss as a child over and over again. Losses that were never explained, except to say, "well we couldn't stay because we would have all been killed and tossed into a ditch." And to know that you will never see any of those places or people again.
And like I said, besides Maryam and her family, you are the only extended family I have ever known. So I have to say, you are all very lucky to have had family, people, roots, people you can call your own besides your stressed parents and lost siblings. I can't change my childhood, but I refuse to continue to feel alone. My sister is once again gone, Javid is trying to get into a school on the East coast. Besides Maryam, Gina is the only other person I know who knows what it is to go through this. To have a constant desire for the one thing that made your life painful, leaving.
I read an article and heard a program on the radio about a couple who were both victims of abuse as children and how it was so important to them to come home to someone who understands that, how it effects their every single day. I was not abused, (well, not enough to complain about) as a child, but imagine the trauma of feeling the loss you all feel when somebody leaves or when you are away, oh I don't know, at least 40 times before you are 10. My parents didn't know when the next move was coming more then a few weeks ahead of time, they did not choose 99% of those moves. We kids didn't know about them until on at least 3 occasions that I remember until we were woken in the middle of the night, told to put on all our clothes, and within an hour be packed with almost nothing into a car never to return again to all the things and people we had fallen in love with there.
I have simpathy for you, precisely because I know very well how you feel. I am just hoping that you can all at least understand that I need some healing.
I need to go back and see all those places, even though they will not be anything like they were, and all the people will be gone. I need to see with my own eyes that they are, that they have not gone up in a hellish blaze.
Lina
Sorry for the self involved pity party I had there Whitney, it is all out of guilt. I wish I had you all here all the time.
But think about this. You are now 19 years old. That is how old I was when I met Nathan, when I began to become a part of an extended family. Imagine not having any understanding of what you know, any of the connections with your aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents, not to mention friends, right now, at 19. And imagine, on top of all that, a mother who was incesantly depressed, hating your brother because he was the eldest boy and you and your sister nothing but worthless girls, and a sister who was battling depression before she was a teenager?? That is where I was at your current age. The meaning that family has brought into your life is something I was not even aware of until I got to know you all, after 19 years of life. Well, I was aware of it, but only as a kid who grows up in poverty might be aware of the other kids and what they have without any ability to share any of it. So I watched Maryam and her extended family, I heard about it, but because they weren't "family" according to my mother, we never could become a part of it. See, my dad was in the military in Afghanistan when the war started, he had lost one wife and so one family, and he did not like the communist coup that started the Russian Afghan war, so we moved to Iran. My mother had grown up amongst her relatives her whole life, she did not have many friends, was incredibly loyal to her family and her own little circle, a home body, and very happy!!
So, when she had to leave all this, well, lets just say she did not have the desire or ability to cope with the distance. So we went from Iran to Pakistan, cause the Iran Iraq war started and houses across the street from us were rubble after night long air raides and bombing and sirens. So my mom is now even further from family, and we can't go back to Afghanistan cause the war is in full force there. Pakistan is not exactly a stable country at this point, and the millions of Afghan refugees pouring in doesn't help, nor the foreign influence from the West or the Arabs. We start getting ransome notes, threatning to kidnap my dad, the whole family, unless he hands over 15 thousand or something like that. My dad was a doctor with his own clinic, but he did not have that much money. So he had been talking to people who were preparing to get out of pakistan and to the West illegally in order to find peace and security for their families, so he jumped on board. Anyway, Germany didn't accept us so we came here. So the point of all this is that through out all those years, and even now, my dad knew and knows and is very good friends with hundreds of people. They all had families. But we didn't get to be close to any of them because my mom knew only one life, one way, and one family, and if she didn't have them, she wanted no one, and that went for her kids too. My dad had travelled for school, he loved and still loves his people and his country. In fact, he is ready to go back. Has been for years. But you see, my moms lack of any time away from family and lack of understanding of real differences in people made our already difficult lives very lonely. My parents didn't want to leave their homes or their family, but my dad was not independently wealthy and he had lived abroad before, so he was the only one out of the whole family to leave. I still believe we might have been better off if he had stayed in Afghanistan and endured the war like the rest of my relatives. But he didn't, and here we are, and who knows what would have happened had we stayed. But my moms constant desire for "family" and nothing else is what made our lives much more lonely than the other refugees who weren't so darn obsessed with their own "blood" relations. I realize this is one extreme, but it is the one I grew up with. My mom would always say nothing was worth the seperation, not even the lives of her children. She always told us that they gave up everything they loved just for our safety, so we better be grateful and do nothing to hurt their pride, like spend time with friends without their presence. I am not exagerating!!. My mom and dad have changed dramatically in the last ten years, basically since my sister and I moved out.
I wish I had the ability to understand the kind of loyalty you all feel for your family name, or your family connections. It is painful to be accused of not understanding the value of the one thing I always wished for, because I can't change what happened and I feel the loss of it every day. This is why I need to be close to Maryam right now, because she is that family to me, and I have missed it for too long. I feel like it is time for me to fill the holes, to start understanding, for my daughters' sakes. And that means understanding the meaning of belonging, and I have always belonged with Maryam and her family, but I have never taken advantage of that feeling, my moms voice was always in my head saying "they aren't your family, you mean nothing to them". I have kicked her out of my head, it is time for me to find my own voice.
Hope you understand, sorry I wasted so much of your time,
Love you lots..
Lina
Hi Whit,
It's so good to get people all stirred up enough to get dialogue going isn't it?
We all tell our stories in hopes of making others understand our position on a certain subject.
Rarely does it change a path or a choice but it is a way of healing and coping.
What are you doing this weekend?
Love you
Aunt Dee
Let me say that my reasons for going to Salt Lake are as follows:
1. Lina gets to go to school.
2. Lina and I get to live with good friends.
3. Adventure and change of pace in a tough economic climate.
4. A chance to rebuild our base and create a stronger, smarter, and more diverse family.
I sincerely want Lina to have a chance to go to school, build her confidence, career, and friendships. Is anyone from my family going to dis-own us if we make this decision? If not then please support us and give us a chance.
Love,
Nathan
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