The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Family

This is #14 in a series of essays on aging.

All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family

                  –Raffi

There is no greater joy than love in a family. You look into the soft eyes of your little girl or walk hand in hand with your spouse—and you know you love and are deeply loved. Even those who have never experienced family feel its pull. I volunteer with an organization that specializes in recovery. Many of the men I meet with have no relationship with their father. Nevertheless, they may ache to find him, to know him. They miss a person they don’t know because a chorus cries out from inside their very being: I want love in my family.

Yet it’s surprisingly common to feel disappointed with family as we grow older—–to endure a nagging sense of futility, or to dwell on failures that might seem petty to others. Disappointment nags, and often reveals deeper hurt.

Some disappointments spring from hard circumstance: death, mental illness, addiction, or some other misfortune that destroys close family ties. They leave a person angry or woebegone.

Other reasons for disappointment are harder to pin down. It may stem from a dispute that seems petty. Sometimes we can’t quite remember how and why our disharmony began. Nevertheless, it’s certainly there. As people age, they may place greater hopes on family. Too often, family can’t match those elevated expectations.

Family gatherings make a classic disappointment trap. Everybody’s coming for Thanksgiving, a happy event that promises to carry you back to an idealized childhood. The trouble is, you don’t live in that ideal childhood, and you’ve forgotten how miserable those Thanksgivings can be.

So Aunt Susie says something awful to Amie, who goes into the bathroom to cry and won’t come out. Susie apologizes and says it was meant as a joke, but then gets angry at Amie for making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s tense. The turkey gets overcooked. After dinner the TV goes on and adults sit in a stupor, watching a football game they aren’t interested in. In the whole long day, not a single conversation occurs that anybody finds uplifting or meaningful.

Yet quite certainly, they will all come back and do it again a year from now.

It’s very normal, but it’s disappointing. The same might be said of other holidays, of family birthdays, or Sunday family dinners.

Such disappointments multiply for those who live near family members and see each other regularly. Close proximity is wonderful, but it can bring latent disagreements into the foreground.

For example, your middle-aged children love their father, but they also find his absent-mindedness a trifle annoying. It’s become a family joke, and for children who live nearby and suffer regularly from forgotten appointments and left-behind items, the joke may stop being funny. Will they make a fuss about it? No, of course not, it’s trivial, but they feel the annoyance. And then they feel crummy because they let something petty spoil the day.

It’s those small rubs that create most of our disappointment with family. It can add up to sadness, because the love of family carries so much weight—as it should. And rarely, rarely, do we get more than a glimpse of its full satisfactions. Family is usually humdrum, as we are; flawed as we are. We long for more, so much more.

Our disappointments remind us that nothing short of heaven will satisfy us. We are not to look for ultimate satisfaction here.

And yet…. Family matters. Love in my family is what I want. We’ve always known that, but we know it far more poignantly as we get old.