MFT Solutions: Healing Relationships

Tag: family

  • Two Roads Diverged

    I belong to an organization that has imploded recently. We were anxious about running a large public event after the pandemic. We divided into two camps: some of us had a lot of faith that we could pull this off and that it would be of benefit to a larger audience. Others were more cautious and concerned about costs.

    Our anxiety got the better of us, and we were not on our best behaviour as we talked with one another. We tried to persuade the other camp. We stopped listening. We escalated our attempts to persuade until we were clearly stepping out of our norms for talking to one another. We broke rules of civility, and rules of order. We called the other camp on their bad behaviour, oblivious to our own.

    It did not go well.

    Now you haven’t seen this anywhere else, have you? Republicans and Democrats? Liberals and Conservatives? Regional conflicts, pandemics, and climate change have us all on edge. Some of us want to help. Some of us want to build walls.

    I tend to demonize the Conservatives. I try to fight that. I understand that at heart their message is, “Don’t tire yourself out so much. Stay home. Rest. Here’s a tax break.”

    I lean towards the Liberals and their message: “There is so much need out there. Give before more people die.”

    “To which camp do you belong?” Is a trick question. Both have merit.

    Paul Tillich, a German theologian, argued that all life has to wrestle with these two conditions. Staying home he called “self-integrity”. Taking risks he called “self-alteration”.

    Even a single cell has to deal with self-integrity and self-alteration. If it just sits in the Petri dish, protecting itself, never venturing out, it starves. If it divides too quickly, or spreads itself out too far, it dissolves.

    How much more does a society have to wrestle with these twin goals of self-preservation and self-alteration. Life is a dialectic: stay home, and go out. You can’t stay home all the time or you’ll starve. You can’t stay out all the time or you’ll die of exhaustion. Find a balance that works for you, of protecting yourself, and venturing out to help others.

  • Finishing Things

    My sister-in-law Karen died this year. She had had a rare form of cancer. She fought it valiantly for some time, but her body just got tired.

    She was married, with three adult children – two with special needs. She had a supportive husband. She worked as a neonatal nurse.

    We weren’t close but we did have some pivotal moments. When Marg and I first dated, we went out for a year and then broke up. When I showed up to see Marg again, a year later, Karen was understandably protective of her older sister. She was suspicious of my intentions, and she watched me carefully, for a long time.

    But I won her over, and Karen was a bridesmaid at our wedding. In my toast to the bridesmaids I said, “In Marg’s house, it was not her father who carried the shotgun.” Karen stood up and shouted, “I did not!”

    But she did carry the shotgun. She looked out for people.

    When Marg was pregnant with our first child, Robert, I got sick: I had to have thyroid surgery. On the day before my surgery I was already in hospital when Marg went into premature labour and was admitted to another hospital. Nobody told me at first: they wanted me to rest before my surgery. The next morning – the day of my operation – they told me.

    I called Karen.

    When I woke up after my surgery, I saw Karen sitting at the foot of my bed. “Marg’s okay,” she said. Then she went back to Marg’s hospital, and told her that I was okay.

    I have mentioned the shower at home that I have been working on. Marg charitably told me recently that she is sure that I have only been working on it for a year or so. But when I go through my records I see that it was “in progress” as far back as March 2022. How long does it take a normal person to renovate a bathroom?

    In my defence, I have a number of handicaps. One is that I am a perfectionist. Another is that I have difficulty asking for help. A third is that I think I have all the time in the world.

    Karen helped me with that third handicap. When she got sick on what was to be the last time, her normally reticent husband called us to ask for help. We went down to see them immediately. We stayed.

    She was well enough to talk to. I reminded her of our wedding. She started crying, and apologized for being so difficult. I praised her for taking care of her family. I thanked her for taking care of me.

    She passed peacefully on June 8th.

    I went home and started working on my bathroom. I finished it yesterday.

  • Legacy

    I am eight years old and leaving my parents for the first time. Leaving the country even. My grandparents are taking me on a road trip to visit my Great Uncle Carl.

    This is us, Carl the younger and Carl the older, at my grandparents’ home in Burlington, Ontario.

    You will notice in the picture that I am younger than 8. Uncle Carl came to my grandfather’s house to visit when I was two. And at 8, I went to see him, in Vermont.

    My grandfather Kenneth Sr. came from Vermont. He married the daughter of a southern plantation owner. They met at university in New York.  She played the violin and had a dramatic flair, the middle of two equally entertaining sisters. He was a middle child, too. His brother Carl was the oldest in a family of all boys. As am I.

    Kenneth Sr. worked for the Beechnut Cough Drop company. In fact they sent him to Burlington to introduce Beechnut Cough Drops to Canada. Some time after he arrived, the company was restructured, and Kenneth lost his job. The man who fired him, Banker Bates, also lived in Burlington, and became his best friend. I met Mr. Bates. Such amazing magic tricks.

    So my grandfather, unemployed in a foreign country, with a wife and family, picked himself up and started again. In life insurance. Eventually he founded his own company. He did well. And he remained in Burlington and raised three children: two girls, and late in life, a boy.  My father, Ken Jr. 

    Not only was my father named after his father but he followed him into business: went to the Wharton School in Philadelphia, then returned home to work in his father’s company. For his entire adult life, except for two years when he lost his job and worked as a night security guard to feed his family, my father remained in insurance until he died. As his father had.

    I was given permission to be somebody different. I wasn’t named after my grandfather. I was named after his talented, wacky, older brother.

    I remember this trip still, the long drive to Vermont.  Motels and candy racks. Nanna asking me if I wanted any candy. “No thank you, Nanna, but I would like some chocolate.” Chocolate is in a class all by itself.

    Aunt Eva provided an endless supply of pink lemonade. They had an outdoor shower hooked up to a garden hose. I stood under it all day.

    At night, I shared a bed with my Nanna – once. She never slept with me again. Apparently I kick in my sleep (although I learned this at 8, I didn’t warn my wife before we got married. Some things you don’t tell…).

    My cousin Margaret took me out to buy chocolate and dinky cars. She taught me you could be safe in a thunderstorm by sitting in a car.

    The best part of the whole trip was watching my Uncle Carl play. He played the piano, the harmonica, and the bass drum – at the same time. I remember him sitting on the piano bench, hands on the keyboard, a metal frame holding the harmonica to his mouth, legs twisted sideways so that he could reach the drum pedal. 

    I was told later that he was being careful not to show off in front of me. Usually, they said, he plays four instruments at the same time, and four different songs.

    He also made things. For years I wore a belt that he had made, and had given me on this trip. And I have a chair that he made.

    The purpose of the trip was to connect me. Later my father gave me a copy of the family tree, going back to the late 1700’s. “We belong to the MacMillan clan,” he said. “Mary Queen of Scots kicked us out of Scotland. We came to America. Your great grandfather saved the life of the president of the United States, by jumping in his carriage and stopping his horses from bolting over a cliff.”

    It was a little scary, belonging to this family of talented people. What would be expected of me?

    A few years after that road trip, my grandfather had a stroke. A year after that, he passed away. And then my grandmother moved to Toronto – closer to her children – and I lost that mythical connection with my ancestors that seemed to flow through Burlington.

    Small wonder that I felt a strong pull to return to the area as an adult. To be different. To be my own person. And yet to be connected.