In the course of family life, children grow and separate from their family. This development can lead to a feeling of estrangement. The petulant young adult sometimes claims that his family “never knew him.”
In a family of average competency and affection, this claim, however emotionally satisfying, is false. There is mystery in our coming into this world, a liminal time when we know not the world around us and are incapable of caring for ourselves. The people in our family care for us in this tender stage, and through that care come to know us.
There are myriad subtle ways that personality, temperament, and the soul begin to reveal themselves in the womb, through birth, and in the preverbal stage of development. Though far from a hard-and-fast rule, it’s interesting to observe how often the circumstances of a child’s birth reveal facets of the emerging person: the buoyant and loquacious child at five was the one who burst from the womb a full week before her due date at a hefty weight and with a strong set of lungs. Likewise, sometimes the child who stubbornly resists birth until 42 weeks remains obstinate, slow to take action, and retiring in personality later in life.
Much more so after birth, the nascent personality can be seen in how the child reacts, expresses preference, sleeps, whines, and smiles. Family is the place where one is first known, the only place where one is truly known for the beginning of life.
In adulthood in affluent societies, people choose friends and a spouse, creating a self-selected family. This new family is not the same, however. In the unnatural state of our modern world, this circle of friends and growing family through marriage, it’s possible, and even likely, that none of these people knew us in our childhood. The forthrightness of living life as a three-year-old and doing the gross and troublesome things that three-year-olds so often do is inaccessible to the people we select to be around us later in life. Our relationships can avoid the awkward physical dependency and vulnerability of real family life for a good many years. Perhaps, in some respects, our relationships are thus impoverished.
Of course, just because our family knows us in a deeply personal and somewhat mysterious way does not mean that we come to enjoy time with each other. It’s true what they say that “familiarity breeds contempt,” and the idiosyncrasies of family members can drive one to distraction. Furthermore, as a child gains independence, choices that were once off-limits become possible, introducing confusion and alienation.
In these circumstances, the knowing that took shape in early life does not disappear. While we may be painfully misunderstood by our families, it is in most cases wrong to say we are not known. Dismissing this primal knowing and belonging is a lost opportunity to engage the full human experience, from helpless newborn to dreamy five-year-old. Those years when we did not consciously know ourselves in a robust sense can sometimes be reflected by the caring people who knew us then. This is, in part, why the experience of being adopted or orphaned can seem so bewildering, the sense of self so fractured by this lack of knowing whence we really came.
In this vale of tears, there are instances of negligence and cruelty, ineptitude and narcissism that mean some people are legitimately unknown even to those who should care for them. Yet, even in then, there is hope. Isaiah 49:15 asks, “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?” As we know from disturbing witness, yes, sometimes a mother does forget her baby. The verse continues, “Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” For the estrangement that is too great to be broached, may there be consolation in the author of our lives who does truly know us as our families should have striven to do.
