Family, part II: sister and weaving the strands of the family tapestry

On Saturday I went, with my mother, to my sister K.'s place in a nearby town to see her 13-year-old son (i.e. my nephew) play game four in his team's best-of-five Tri-county hockey finals. It was an exciting game, and my nephew C. scored the final two goals for his team, who won 4-3 to tie the series at 2 games apiece (they won game five yesterday to take the championship!).

K. lives in a smaller city/town about 40 kilometres west of my city, but the scene at the hockey rink might as well have been a different country from where I live. There was a big crowd of parents, grandparents, siblings and friends, all enthusiastic and out to cheer on the home team. My sister knew a lot of the other moms and dads and there was a real sense of community and family to the whole place. And over on the other side was the whole thing repeated for the visiting team, who were themselves from another town about 40 kilometres to the south.

I was struck by the vivid contrast between the scene before me and not only the scene I live in, but also the scene in which I myself grew up. There was a closeness and togetherness, within the families themselves and between the families, a wide, intergenerational community united with a common purpose and celebrating achievement. I longed to trade my solitary existence for such a sense of belonging.

I remember when I was an adolescent how completely disconnected I felt from my family, and how any sense of community I felt was with other dysfunctional teenagers. I recognised that not only did I as a teenager understandably fail to recognise the gravity of the antisocial behaviour choices I made at the time, but so did the rest of what little structure I had of my family, school, community and whatever other feeble forces were or ought to have been acting on me at the time. I played hockey but there was nothing there to weave it into part of the life of our family. There was nothing to weave at all really, just a few ambitious strings here and there, stretching out all alone from a single point to other tiny islands. No fabric. No tapestry.