Family !!

Nothing is permanent in this world except family.

No matter how far you go, no matter how bad the situation gets, the only people who will be there for you are your FAMILY. They will be the ones who hold you, pick you up, guide you and love you.

You know how sometimes they shout at you, but cannot tolerate anyone else speaking against you? They often fight with you, but cannot stand watching someone else fight with you.

So let’s face it. The one thing that stays constant is that they are always there.

Whatever they do, it is simply because they care about you and don’t want to lose you.

The part we get wrong

This is the thing we misunderstand most. We react the wrong way - which is human nature - and then at some point we realise our reaction was wrong. We love them equally. We just didn’t show it in that moment.

I think it happens because family is the only place most of us feel safe enough to be unpleasant. You would never speak to a colleague the way you snap at your mother when you are tired. Not because you respect the colleague more, but because there is no risk with your mother. She will still be there at dinner.

That safety is a gift, and we use it carelessly. We give our best manners to people who barely know us, and hand our worst moods to the people who have never once left.

Worth noticing. Worth changing, even a little.

They are also just people

Something else I have come to understand since I first wrote this.

Family is made of people who were figuring it out with no instructions, usually while exhausted, usually while worried about money or someone’s health. They got things wrong. Some of them got quite big things wrong.

Realising that does not take anything away from them. It does the opposite. It turns them from figures who were supposed to be perfect into people who tried very hard with what they had. That is much more impressive than perfect, and it is far easier to forgive.

The sacrifices are almost always the quiet ones you never got told about. The job that wasn’t taken. The thing that was never bought. The worry carried silently so it wouldn’t reach you. Nobody announces those. You find out years later, if at all.

After all, we want them with us every day.

We cannot survive without them.

We fight, we love, we cry, we dance, we sing, we enjoy - all these emotions we share happily, and mostly only with our family.

So do the small thing

Let’s make a habit of telling them, at least once a day, that we love them so much. Make them feel special. Let them know that all the sacrifices they make for us are seen and respected.

And if your family is not one where those words are said easily - many are not - it does not have to be words. Call for no reason. Ask about the thing they mentioned last week and actually remember the answer. Sit with them without your phone. They will understand it perfectly.

Love your family, because at the end they will be the ones who stayed.

Say it before you need to

One last thing, and it is the only genuinely urgent line in this piece.

The conversation you keep meaning to have with someone in your family - the thank you, the apology, the thing that has never actually been said out loud - has a deadline you cannot see.

Everyone assumes there is time. There usually is, right up until there isn’t, and the people I know who carry the heaviest regret are almost never carrying something they did. They are carrying something they meant to say and assumed they could say later.

Say it this week. It will be awkward, it will take four minutes, and you will never once regret having done it.

-kashish