While I ate cake at a family gathering: Thoughts on family

Overlapping conversations filled the room. Suddenly, everyone was trying to outshout the other. It was small talk. Insults and bitterness disguised as banter. Mothers were trying to finish their sentences, and the kids pulled at their sleeves for whatever demand they had at the moment, while the fathers ignored everyone and watched the game.

I stood in the corner, a paper plate with a half-eaten slice of cake in my lap, while my eyes were strained with confusion. Looking around me, I realized: I don’t know that many happy families.

In the conversations I had with these people, at some point I heard each of them say they would’ve done things differently had they known beforehand. All of them had the same regret: marriage. For some reason, that was the choice they all regretted. They saw it as a thing holding them back. Maybe they loved each other, in whatever version of love they can, but they regretted… settling down, I guess. And that turned into bitterness towards their spouses.

I remember once talking about mutual respect between lovers as a foundation for their relationship, and I was told I was chasing fairy tales. I should’ve known: they were all just unhappy. Bitterness laced those conversations since I was a kid. I was raised in it. That, combined with (passive) aggressiveness, marked my childhood.

“Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Leo Tolstoy

But all that ends up being hereditary. The things you witness and live through in your childhood home, in whatever way, whatever capacity, end up following you into adulthood. Whatever life you choose to build for yourself, your choices will be determined by what you lived as a kid.

My choice was not to have a family, because what is this idea that everyone keeps pushing onto me? If it obviously doesn’t work for anyone? What do I do around so many unhappy people? What if, one day, my significant other talks that way about me, about us? What if I think that I want it so much despite it, and then wake up one day feeling trapped?

I sat there, turning that one piece of cake in my mouth, while the kids ran around, playing Tag, and the TV was blasting.

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