....Family

I discovered that in life family always is the first experience we have of let-down, betrayal and extreme judgement.....Initially I set out on a plan to live in total oblivion of the parts of my family that had disappointed me I even wrote out a plot to slowly cut myself off them.
But life being the good teacher it has always been presented some lessons where the common saying that 'blood is thicker than water' was clearly demonstrated to me.
I am not a negative person but I am very human. I am as fast as any person can be to forgive but I am slow, very slow if ever to forget.
However I have come to perceive the true essence of family, it is not to shield you from life or to be good to you all the time. Family can be split into smaller units put there specifically to prepare you for life.
Those who will love you to bits and have so much faith in you; those who were heroes: Those who loved to give hope. They will encourage you and always give you the feather bed or a soft landing in life. These are the people who make the softer part of you. And for me they were scarce so ultimately I am not a very soft person but once again I state, I am human.
Then there are the critics, the pretenders, the abusers, the haters and those who just seemed not to care. These are the people who either make you work so hard to prove them wrong or people who would break you so much that you would totally lose your whole life or bits of it. These are the people who would make you have phobias. Make you avoid some things in life (that are not necessarily bad) because of how they handled them. These are the people that influence the survivor or victim in you, these are the people who make some hate family or pretend to love family but have fumes of pain, anger and regret brewing in you.....and these people were also scarce in my life but the few who were there were so close and always there and they rubbed the pain so hard that I felt that they were the majority. This makes me (fortunately not a victim) a survivor.
I have grown up to know that all these people were vital and still are important to my life and because they are family I wear out my threads to the bare minimum to help them wherever I can. There are some I would love to forget, ignore because I can barely remember having good times with them, they inflicted big wounds psychologically and physiologically that have grown into ugly scars or are even still septic wounds but they are still family and that always triggers a soft thought for them occasionally.
It is not right to tell anyone to love them because they are family because there are some things that are too big to look past. But it is reasonable to say we can put up with them, we can ask The Almighty God for Grace to help us forgive and forget. It is best to say for our own good, growth and health; we have to focus on the positive. Say God knows why what happened, happens or is happening is so but is looking out for us and thus put on a positive front. Have hope and remember we are all human....the best way to look at the relatives is to focus on their good points.