Recognizing Our Family

Knowing family is not a birthright.  It is a lifelong occupation.  It is at worst a duty.  It is at best a dance.

When our son was going off to a job in Spain soon after graduating from car design school, our family was pretty intensely involved in connecting with him.  Kathy and I and his sisters worked to find ways of spending time with him, time for conversation, for committing to memory the curves of his face, for stealing not-really accidental glances of touch.  Now more than a dozen years later he thinks about moving back to the U.S., maybe even back to Detroit where he can be closer to old friends, and to us.  And again Kathy and I and his sisters are working to find time to encourage him to follow through on it, to let him know how much it means to us.

When Chris was on his way to Europe, he said that we didn’t really know him.  

He was not protesting or reprimanding us.  He was just making a philosophical statement.  He said that when we come together, we know at best only his past, and even then only the part of his past we know about.  I recall well that there was, in his manner of saying this, a kind of calm authority, of self-possession.  I think of the young Jesus “lost” in the temple; he was not really lost at all, but merely finding himself.  Chris would go to Spain, “lost” from us, and away from a lovingly imposed history, find himself. 

Because over these years we have seen him only at long intervals, we would on seeing him instinctively struggle to recognize him, to see how he had changed, because we assumed that he had.  In Barcelona he had come to live in the customs and language.  Later in Frankfurt, he had entered the cool and gray of German culture.  We studied his face when we met him at the airport; we snuck glances at the way he held himself. 

Meanwhile, we and our daughters live within 500 miles of each other, and see each other regularly and talk often on the phone, hearing nuance in each other’s voices.  And we are lulled into thinking we know each other for the sheer accumulation of historical evidence.  We more easily fall into building around each other shells of identity.  We more easily characterize each other.

So as I reflect on it, I’m not really surprised that this Christmas, the issue of being not really known by each other arose.  It was as if our son’s long-ago philosophical statement about not really knowing each other had been the subconscious (or perhaps subcutaneous) introduction of a theme that now returned in a crescendo of emotion.

Recognition dinners are celebrations of people who are generally well-known.  They can be droning, pandering affairs or they can be opportunities to come to really know them by learning what we didn’t know, so that we are blessed to really re-cognize them, to re-think about them, to come closer to knowing them who we thought we knew.

There is a world of difference between identification and recognition.  We can identify our children, our parents, our partners or spouses; we can pick them out from a crowd.  But to recognize them means to re-cognize, re-think who they are.