Is Family All?

For the very same reason that we have had more ups and downs with our relatives, we should hold them more accountable for what they do.

The screen is yellow, Mexican. "I wish he was dead," Leonel spitfires to his uncle, Hector, after Marco beheads Leonel's toy. Hector whistles Marco for a cold beer from a bucket, and when he kneels, he suffocates him. "This is what you wanted...your brother dead." After thirty seconds of shirt-pulling and a slap, the scene ends with a low-angle shot of Hector saying family is all.

Family is all is a recurring topic in Breaking Bad, a series about family and bald men devoted to it. A bald Marine Corp turns into a hitman to support his granddaughter. Older and balder, Marco and Leonel become hitmen who decapitate people who oppose their families. Walter, the bald protagonist, puts a price on people threatening his family, even if the victims are almost like family.

The idea that family is all often comes with a commitment to love them no matter what they do. Family can belittle us, lie to us, and suffocate us, but we must love them. They are family, and family is messy and complicated and all.

My upbringing makes it difficult to accept family is all. My parents, like every parent, gave me more than I needed in some areas and less in others. I, for example, craved emotional support and got some of it, but not as much as I would have wanted. Some people resent their parents for this, others don't think about it, and others accept it as they age. I responded by fulfilling these needs through friends. Past my twentieth birthday, I have paid for many of the things I needed and that my parents gave me financial, health, and academic support. As a result, the overall things I received and needed from my parents went down, and the things I got from my friends went up, causing me to become less tolerant of transgressions from my parents and family.

Few friends understand where I come from. My stance appears weirder when they remember I'm from Latin America, where it is common to live near our parents throughout our lives. 

To understand why family is all, I attended many in-person and online salons about family and relationships the year my mom passed away. A man told a story about something his best friend did to him, and it was horrendous, and we disapproved of his friend's actions. A woman recounted the times her ex cheated on her, and everyone seemed ready to jump on him. I talked about a transgression from my family, and people said family is different. In the second season of Breaking Bad, Walter misses the delivery of his daughter to deliver a stash of meth in time. His wife, Skyler, ends up in the labor room with Ted, her boss. Since family is all and different, Walter and Skyler forgive each other, just like the attendees and their families did.

Certainly, what we deem a deal breaker will differ from person to person. I wouldn't cut my relationship with my dad if he made fun of something I valued, but I might if someone I'm meeting for the first time does it. I am not granting family immunity to deal breakers, but I recognize the average tolerance will be higher. 

Greek tragedies present different tolerance levels. In Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Orestes, son of Agamemnon, tolerates his mom's cheating on his dad until she goes "too far" and kills his Agamemnon. Polyneices and Eteacles kill each other, fighting over the throne of Thebes. The new ruler of Thebes, Creon, their uncle, prohibits Polyneices's burial, denying the divine meaning of burial and symbolically extending the control of the king past death. Antigone, their sister, dies for burying Polyneices. Orestes' limit is when the worst happens, Creon's limit is when family actions are against the law, and for Antigone, it is more important to honor family, the underworld, and the unwritten world than to judge her family's transgressions. Across all my relationships, I define what to tolerate based on what we and the other person have lived and not on the existence of a blood bond. It's an arbitrary, loose, and faulty metric. Yours might be a mix of all these determinants or something completely different.

Some friends have suggested that my stress might come from trying to change people. If only I could accept my family for who they were, they wouldn't be able to hurt me because there wouldn't be anything to be hurt by. 

As much as I would love to live under permanent acceptance, it's not so simple because others won't live under it. Bukowski's dad yanked the poet's pants down and whipped him with a razor strop for years. The less hurt Bukowski seemed, the harder his dad lashed out. Bukowski "accepted" it: his eyes dried, the room didn't blur, and he felt no fear. His cheeks remained swollen.

When I've tried, or, technically, not tried to surrender to reality, I've found it useful to ask how much of what I'm doing is accepting reality and how much of it is unnecesasry suffering. 

Posing a question implies that I'm unwilling to surrender and accept how people are, or else I wouldn't be questioning. However, given that I would not accept whipping, deliberate harm, or misconduct from others, I can't justify why I would from family.

A helpful exercise could be to set conditions by which you'd reduce time with family and stick to those rules. Does being with the person enrich your life, or does it decrease your quality of living? Does the relationship contribute to your overall happiness and well-being, or does it consistently diminish it? Are the compromises made to sustain the relationship increasingly impinging on your boundaries? 

Distancing in a relationship doesn't disregard what was. I see it as an act of love toward what it could be. You can always re-engage. The time you spend separated often sparks change in others or gives you ideas to improve the relationship. During this time of distance, you can attempt to accept more of the unideal traits of family members. If you can't, that's great, too, as the time distance still decreased how long you were exposed to "the bad."

For the very same reason that we have had more ups and downs with our relatives, we should hold them more accountable for what they do. My older family members and I grew up in the same chaotic world. I'm now more careful with the words I use. There are genders I don't know about. Some jokes are better than others. I'm not the only malleable human. I have fucked up in the past, but I try to be better, and I think our families can too. I may think differently when I am bald, and my kids wail, shouting I don't understand them. Maybe by then, I will happily drink a beer, knowing I know best.