On Family History and Secrets

Tomorrow, I present my genogram to my peers and supervisor at CPE.  And so I spent quite a while on the phone with my parents (while on the greyhound back to Syracuse from Rochester, at that) talking about family history and family dynamics and the like.  And I spent a good while drawing it all out.  I was rather amazed at some of the patterns that appear and then stop- it's really quite powerful.  There are some rather nasty family issues a couple of  generations back- things that I never knew about as a kid, and only started to hear bits about around when I left for college.  And my grandparents made them irrelevant to my life- I really feel like they never touched me.  It's a sort of quiet heroism that makes me think differently about what was already always presented as a beautiful although always reasonable and human relationship.  Talking to Dad about it all also gave me a much richer image of what his childhood, growing up with his grandmother living with them, was like. 

It also made me much more aware of how connected certain parts of the family have been, and exactly where there are "broken links".  The last time there was contact with my maternal grandfather's sister was when my mother was a child.  We don't know a thing about her life since then, and that's a story that I really don't know at all.  On the other hand, on my father's side, I had real relationships with certain of my second cousins as a child, and we have a connection with at least one of my third cousins and her parents.  I'm amazed at some of the inconsistencies of connection and texture.  When I asked about family tensions, one of the first things that was mentioned was the "black sheep" of the family from my great-grandmother's generation, on Dad's side.  Mom's side has always been much more open about such things- the tensions have always been apparent, and very thickly textured and on-going, while on Dad's side, they seem to be Stories.  I'm really interested to see how I feel and what more I notice as I present it all.  

I've also gone back and forth several times about whether or not I draw jakal88 in.  Even if we don't marry, he's a Significant relationship, and I rather want to- he's a major part of my life, but it also feels like I'm presuming on something that isn't a sure thing.  I mean, there's a way to notate relationships that aren't marriages, but I also feel superstitious about it.  Maybe that reaction is something worth noting in and of itself. 

(Speaking of, we had a nice weekend together, fairly quiet, as he is still getting over being sick.  However, we had his lab-mates over for Shabbat dinner, which was quite nice: thank goodness, I liked them and seemingly vice versa as well.  My one down point for the weekend was being at the bookstore waiting for jakal88 to get a haircut, him coming to meet me, and some guy started talking to him about sci-fi, and would not listen to a word I said, and I know plenty about the genre myself.  It was really infuriating- I didn't even realize how angry I was about it until afterwards, when I snapped at jakal88 for something completey absurd.  I was just Really put off by being ignored- and jakal88 was really trying to help me be part of the conversation, too.  It was really quite odd and uncomfortable.  But the rest of the weekend was lovely, although it felt very short.)