Resilience and Family
By: Shelby Tone
My twin sister selected me as maid of honor at her wedding the November following our graduation from Hillsdale College. Was I happy for her? Yes, definitely. Were there tears and floundering fingers pointed at God? Yes, definitely. As someone striving to be a decent Christian, I had to wonder why my negative feelings of inner chaos, even resentment, sprang up during a time that I ought to have been overjoyed for her.
The wedding marked the loss of my relationship with the person whom I had been closest to my whole life. We could relate to each other almost telepathically because of our shared upbringing. From that wedding onward, I would no longer be “first” in her or anybody’s mind. I felt lost. She was married; I was still single. What was irreconcilably wrong with me? Almost all my friends were engaged by senior year, and yet I graduated sans any romantic relationship experiences. Where was the God who seemed like He should smile upon the marriage I envisioned for myself when I looked at my sister?
Two years later, my “mirror image” for 22 years is now not just married but also the mom of a four-month-old. I’m unable to comprehend what marriage or pregnancy are like. A metaphorical gulf and eleven-hour drive separate my sister from me.
I suspect many can relate to this relationship shift with a sibling or other family member. We may think of campus as a utopia, but heartbreaking iterations of family disfunction, divorce, and sibling estrangement teem behind classmates’ careful facades. Nor need family strife be extreme in order to initiate trouble and soul-searching. Even before the life-stage issue crept between my sister and me, we had to confront intense sisterly competitiveness. Likewise, all sorts of inner chaos abounded as I extricated myself from the expectations my parents had for pre-college me, from major choice to life goals.
While in college, each shake-up or transition in my relationship with myself and with family members challenged me. You might currently think, “of course I will only celebrate my sibling’s accomplishments,” or, “of course I will always agree with my parents,” but even if you refuse to admit it, such transitions will challenge you too.
This is where resilience enters. It’s tempting to think of resilience as something you need to cultivate when an external situation imposes itself on you, like an F from Dr. Jackson. But resilience is also something to identify and develop in how you handle internal crises of identity and connection. My real struggle is not so much the physical separation from my sister. It’s that I must wrestle with my own upended desires related to family, my own sin of jealousy, and my own fundamental moral understandings of life.
Engaging in those struggles requires and builds resilience. Think you’ve come to terms with your life compared to your sister’s? I did. Then your sister might decide to return to you and Hillsdale and pursue a master’s degree, like mine will this fall. It will be great. And it will be hard. The paradoxical emotions I feel about my sister’s return remind me of the quote in the title of my Great Books One paper about Ovid’s Philomela and Tereus: “For good and evil are all heaped together.”
How do I, or anyone, untwist the webs of love and resentment, hope and jealousy, uncertainty and faith, that surrounds many a messy family relationship? Let me propose three practical tips, and you can join me as fellow travelers through family tensions that prevail in college and beyond:
Reflect
You will find it impossible to come to terms with an imperfect sibling or parent relationship if you avoid addressing it. You cannot heal or forgive anything that you deny. Instead of hiding from confrontation via food, alcohol, pornography, movies, etc., turn and face the flames. What this meant for me was typing out 54 pages of childhood memories, resentments, and regrets about my family. But you can act more moderately than this and simply spend time journaling every week, trying not to censor your thoughts between your mind and the page. Angry at God? Write it down. Upset with your sister? Write a letter to her that you’ll never send. Be honest about what you feel. This doesn’t mean endorsing every feeling or sinful thought, but it does mean accepting reality.
Communicate
If you silently simmer about a broken relationship while also beating yourself up for simmering, you will keep spiraling. If you always expect someone else to extend a peace offering, the gulf between you will widen. Choose to be vulnerable. Blurt out to a friend over coffee, “you know, my family isn’t actually as cohesive as you would think.” Stop putting up the mask that you have it “all together.” Walk into a dear professor’s office and tell him that you aren’t looking forward to going home for break. Tell the sibling whom you’re up in arms with that you’re struggling with resentment. Go talk to a counselor at the Health Center and burn through some of that shame or guilt you carry before it explodes unpredictably in family discussions. Practice and learn resilience.
Step Back
Recognize that the present is not the future. Your job is to rely on God and to take the next seemingly right step. You can’t fix a family yourself. Only God can. You’re not absolved of responsibility, but you are only a player acting on a much larger stage, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Focus on little wins and little choices, and don’t beat yourself up for not being able to reconcile everything…yet. Decide to ask your grandma a few questions about her childhood over Thanksgiving dinner instead of sitting in normal awkwardness. Walk with your sister and discuss your fears and feelings of inferiority. Work on being healthy so that when faced with an opportunity to draw closer to your family, you will be able to see the opportunity and withstand the ramifications of taking it. Rather than anxiously rushing everything and everybody toward a state of relative perfection, trust and obey the patient plod of God’s transforming plans.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what the future holds with my sister or parents. A week ago, I felt relaxed waiting for God’s beautification of my family relationships. As I write now, I look with worry upon some of the changes coming. And yet, I have learned that resilience doesn’t mean defiantly standing while the waves of anxiety break around me. It doesn’t mean shuttering the tides out with a wall. It means being able to ride the waves that come.
Do not mistake the transient chaos and internal angst that result from unfinished business or thwarted desires as solely bad. Let all that is unfounded or unworthy in relationships collapse. From that rubble—and there will be rubble—you can reconcile a more honest and godly relationship with your family. Engage with the rubble. Embrace the mixture of chaos and order bubbling around you and recognize the balance of it. That is resilience.
