Families and letting go

Trish Carn considers the meaning of family

My uncle once built a stable for my parents’ crèche. This nativity scene was an important part of Christmas as I grew up. My immediate family was small. My parents each had one sister and, as neither had children, I had no cousins, only a younger brother. The family was enlarged through ‘honorary’ aunts and uncles and their children. I loved visiting my grandparents and my father’s sister and her husband, who built lots of things – including my dining table and corner cupboard.

Then I married, leaving my parents to start my own family. The crèche as an emblem of Christmas took on a new resonance. I no longer felt that the Christmas story was more than a lovely, but important, myth. It symbolises, for me, love, the spirit of Christ – the Inward Light. I still put the crèche out to remind me. My five children span eleven years and two marriages. Despite the usual squabbling, we have stayed close.

This connection is important to me as a mother. But then, slowly, it became a time of letting go as they each married and began their families. Now the nine grandchildren are growing up. Getting all eighteen of us together has become more difficult. However, we do try to meet in early January to remember our older son/brother, Peter, who died in 2010 – the ultimate ‘letting go’. The family has changed as we have gradually let go of our parents, aunts, uncles and others.

Biological families, however, are not the only kind of family. Each of the several Meetings of which I have been part has been an extended family. None has been more so than Pittsburgh Meeting. Members of the Meeting pooled their funds and bought two houses in a declining area of the city to form the nucleus of Pittsburgh Quaker Community (PQC). The first house, named Romans 12:4, epitomises what I feel a family is. Verses 4-5 read:

‘For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.’

In each of the Meetings we have attended I have felt part of the Quaker family. This is especially so in those where we have been wardens. However, each house-move has required another letting go.

Working in a team is another type of family. This has been especially true at the Friend. Our team has changed several times during my employment. I have been at the Friend three times, twice covering maternity leave and this time for eleven and a half years. We work quite hard getting the issue out each week but also have a laugh while doing it. This is my final edition of the Friend – it is another letting go.

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