Our Family Doesn't Do That

We don’t do that, which became: We don’t allow ourselves to do that. And be “we” I mean my family, and by family I mean my parents and siblings. Sidebar on “family”

How Family Is Used to Excuse the Inexcusable

Family is a construct, and like all constructs, it covers for something darker, and more complex, than we’d like to admit. Many families use words like “love” and “loyalty” to mask all matter of toxicity and aggression, both passive and overt. … invoking “the family” becomes a means of blunting anger, of sublimating resistance. When an authority invokes the family, it’s often to subjugate the subordinates and get them to willingly conform with “less”.

I was raised believing that WE don’t do THOSE THINGS. Drugs, children out of marriage, major crime, blasphemy, second families, divorce, homosexuality. And yet, my cousins, aunts and uncles did those things, but we believed WE didn’t do those things.

I thought it was a statement of virtue. I didn’t think we were elite or morally superior. Then I thought: we didn’t allow ourselves to do those things.

It wasn’t a positive rule, it was a DDT (don’t do that). It was a tribal taboo, and the tribe was the six of us. It wasn't self-discipline; it was groupthink restraint. It was a shorthand of the lessons my parents taught me before I was five, to make sure I’d remember them as I grew up. Because you’ve got to get a kid pointed the right way early, I imagine them saying.

In the end it was Family like a Mafia with our own twisted, inconsistent rules we accepted as normal, as an aspiration. And if you stood apart from the family, you were Alone, cut off, and nothing good would come of that. You’d be alone in the darkness, and even a mangy family is better than being alone.

It was a method of control, and a method of installing a long-term point of view in case my parents died young, and I got the message. And I’ve broken about every one of those rules.