I ran the Boston Half Marathon for the second time this weekend with my dad. My brother, who just moved to Boston, came to watch. My mom came up this weekend to help move my brother in, and my oldest brother came down to help too.
I was able to spend a lot of time with my family, catching up on what they’re doing. The previous weekend, I went to my grandmother’s 85th birthday party and saw relatives I only see around Christmas and Easter. Seeing how happy it made my grandmother to have old friends and family around her, I realized how crucial family really is.
Family, no matter how you define that as, is important. No matter who constitutes your “family,” it’s important to check in with them. Sometimes we take for granted how easily we can communicate with them. When my grandmother immigrated to the United States from Switzerland, she was the only one from her family to do so. Keeping in contact with them was hard for her — they weren’t just a phone call away. Nowadays, we can text, email and tweet at different members of our family — there are so many ways to keep up with our family members, we should be able to take the time to see how they’re doing.
Making sure that you keep in contact with your family is important. Outside of high school, it’s hard to find the time to stay in contact with them. We no longer see them come home every night, or go visit our grandmother’s house on the weekend. Thanks to the decisions my parents made, I had my grandparents close to me when I was growing up. Being able to have my family so close helped guide me through my childhood. Being in college in Boston, so far away from them, has been hard.
I try to call my parents every weekend just to check in and see how they’re doing. They can drive me crazy sometimes, but I know there’s nothing they won’t do for me. I am so fortunate to have parents that care about me as much as they do. However, I know this is not the case for everyone, many families can get complicated, and sometimes even toxic.
Family dynamics are interesting and different for every person. My parents are divorced, which took a lot of time getting used to. Although my parents have done the best they can do when it comes to ensuring that my and my brother’s lives haven’t changed, few things could remain the same. It’s been a lot easier to deal with since I got to college, but coping with this changing dynamic has been hard, especially since the past few years have changed a lot. Knowing that my parents have tried hard to reduce the stress it puts on us means a lot.
When it comes to families, there’s a few things that need to be remembered. Aside from being members of our family, they’re people with their own lives. As much as I’d like to think that my parents’ lives revolve around me, that isn’t the case. They’re busy with work and friends and keeping up with everything. We are all busy with work and our personal lives, but making time to talk to our families is important. Balancing all the different relationships we have — familial, romantic, platonic and the like — can be hard sometimes.
Family dynamics are always changing and can get messy sometimes. The members of our family can drive us crazy in the best ways sometimes, but at the end of the day, they love us the best they can. Everyone has a different family dynamic and that can be hard for some people. Whoever we define as “family,” whether they are related to us or not, are crucial to our development as people. They’ve watched us and helped us grow, nurtured us and took care of us when we couldn’t take care of ourselves.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
