The Buried Family: My Family Is A Disjointed Family

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” - Jane Howard. Now matter how broken, everyone has a family. Whether it be the one they are born into or the people they chose and it serves an important role in everyone’s lives. Family are the people you can’t live with and can’t live without, they’re your shoulder to cry on and the people who tease you endlessly. My family means the world to me, they always have my back, and there is no one else I would rather spend every Christmas and Thanksgiving with. That being said, my family is still a stellar example of a disjointed family. Divorced parents who both remarried, four half-siblings, arguments that go back decades,

The works of The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, Buried Child by Sam Shepard, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and Third by Wendy Wasserstein are examples of dysfunctional families that have illuminated for me although everyone strives to be the ideal family, the perfect family does not

In Buried Child, Halie says, “You can’t force a thing to grow. You can’t interfere with it. It’s all hidden. Unseen. You just gotta wait ‘til it pops up out of the ground.” This can be applied to her grandson Vince’s desire to be immediately welcomed back into family after not being around for upwards of a decade. He pushes so hard for his grandfather, Doge, and dad, Tilden, to recognize him and be happy for his arrival, he forgets that pressing is not always effective due to the past trauma his family has been through . This past year it became clear that my paternal grandmother’s heart was giving out due to old age and she was dying. My dad made it his goal to make the last few days of her life the best they could be. In his interpretation of achieving this was to ask all of his five children to say goodbye together to Grammy with him. However, there was one catch. My three older-half siblings were not on speaking terms with him, angry about something that had occurred over a year earlier. My dad wanted to show my grandmother that we were a united family and would be okay without her, while good in principles, it was not the truth. He desperately wanted this to be the truth, but in the process of demanding the attendance of all his children, he was trying to force them together, when they were not ready to talk to him. In both the case of my family and Vince’s