How We Choose
Family and Friends
By John W. Fountain
The following is a column by award-winning Chicago SunTimes columnist, author and publisher John W. Fountain that
was published August 18, 2011.
M
y mother’s doorbell chimed one recent sunny
afternoon while I was visiting. I don’t know
how I knew it was the Jehovah’s Witnesses as
my mother answered the front door.
Maybe it was their tone—official and yet filled with a kindness
that rang in their voices. Sure enough, it was them, I determined
after hearing them ask if they could come in and “share.”
My first inclination was to quickly shoo them away, partly out
of having been raised in a Pentecostal Bible-thumping church
and taught to repel those who
didn’t completely share our beliefs.
It was soon clear they had been
there before, and the conversation that ensued—about my
mother’s health, about how she was feeling and getting along—
and the sense I detected of their genuine concern for her as a
huma n being made me see them less as “the enemy” and more as
her friends, if not a kind of extended family.
It also got me thinking again about the real meaning of family,
about friends and their virtue; about how some people we see as
being just friends actually sometimes treat us better than so-called
family—cheer, embrace, love and care for you more than naturalborn sisters and brothers, even more than sons and daughters,
mothers or fathers.
It reminded me of the distinct difference I draw between
“relatives” and “family” and also of the need I have found in my
own life to sometimes relegate some family members to simply
being relatives while elevating some friends to family status.
I have buried family in my heart and mind at times in my life
with a heavy heart, having experienced the pain of rejection from
my own natural father and his side of the family; after having
been dissed, shunned or rejected by some in my family who
ought to have embraced me.
I have done so having witnessed a trail of broken lives of
people who time and time again have faced a cycle of perpetual
hurt by people who were supposed to love them but who seem
too often to disregard their feelings, reject, abuse, backbite,
backstab or denigrate them with little to no apparent remorse.
“You’re too sensitive,” some of the offenders say in pomposity, without the slightest hint of empathy. “You need to get
over it.”
And yet, the greater sin in all of this, in my estimation, is not
any hardheartedness of the members of the so-called family
who have caused offenses or repeated
them more times than we can count,
or even any abuses we may have suffered. It is this: Our willingness to
accept over a lifetime mistreatment or
abuse from some folks simply because they are “family”—the kind of
treatment we would not tolerate even
for one second from anyone else.
It is the debilitating and crippling effects of hurt inflicted
often by our own blood that leaves so many unfruitful and
hopelessly stuck in hurt and brokenness. It is the inability to
accept that sometimes those folks least good for us, least
safe—for our own peace, health and sanity’s sake— are some
members of the very families were born into. It is a story as old
as Cain and Abel.
One of my toughest lessons in life was learning to let go,
knowing when to choose me, to choose life and the pursuit of
wholeness. It was also learning to forgive, and understanding
that forgiveness never requires that I also forget; and that
blood may be thicker than water but it is not greater than love.
That afternoon, the Jehovah’s Witnesses lingered for a while
and my mom introduced me.
“You don’t get to choose your family,” one of them said.
“Oh, but you do,” I replied.
You really do.
One of my toughest lessons in
life was learning to let go,
knowing when to choose me, to
choose life and the pursuit of
wholeness.
14
The Well Magazine Fall/Winter 2013