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01/11/2003 Archived Entry: "Family ties are the ties that bind painfully"

Off to visit family this weekend (and hence no nightly blog entry tonight)...I'm not really negative about it, though unfamiliar (pun!) with them. When I left home in 1989 and moved from Merritt to Vancouver I made an unconscious choice not to involve any but my closest family in my life. Experiences with a few of them left me bitter about the whole family concept. As an example, I haven't made the 3.5 hour drive for Christmas since. My friends down here became my family and I always celebrated with them (or alone, which I really didn't mind all that much).

There's always been the "good side" and the "bad side" in my family and I, son of a drunken trucker father and the bad daughter mother, was definitely on the bad side according to my grandparents (mothers side). All of us kids were pre-judged at the moment of birth and things were never quite as happy when we were around.

My mothers parents have passed on, and things are apparently improving in the 'good side' and I'm taking my new bride to meet them. I can't say the prospect doesn't unnerve me a fair bit, but I'm a different, stronger person than I was when family was so dysfunctional I left. I'm hoping nothing more than things to be real...if they are nice that's just a bonus.