Fully Operational Extended Family

Wow, I feel like I keep trying to find legitimate syncs to see if Im on the right path in life. I’m wondering if this is one of them. Last night I posted on a social media app a few images of multi-generational families from movies. I think we need to seem more positive representation of harmonious multi-generational households. I did the whole #multigenerationalfamilyiswealth. Hope this resonates with you G.

I was considering a post on how understanding of family is neither stronger nor weaker than our understanding of gender, because at their root, they are the same thing.

I was thinking about several recent Hollywood productions, and my first inclination after watching them, is to ask if any of the writers have healthy relationships with any family members. Because I certainly don’t see it in what they write.

Rings of Power was comically bad that way.
Wednesday (Addams) [the Netflix production] was full of quotable quips, but the heart of the Addams was missing, because they went for the family conflict angle, when the Addams have always been a close-knit loyal, if occasionally homicidal family. The first movie from the 90’s even has the best example of a Family Home Evening that I can think of.

And if people can’t imagine healthy families, they certainly can’t create them.
And if there are no families, what does gender even mean?

Yeah, I think my family is more rare than common that way. I am trying, in my fiction, to show what all sizes and extensions of fully operational families look like, how they’re built, and how to maintain them.

Somewhat unrelated, but I am also trying to bring friendship back through stories. I feel like our society has become so saturated in dysfunction that everyone automatically thinks ‘romantic relationship’ when they see any two people doing anything together. This is sad and a lapse in our collective imagination.
Unfortunately, my own long-time friendships have been slowly withering because, despite great efforts on my part to maintain our relationship, my oldest friends seem to have become infected with wokeness and are quickly drifting away from everything they once believed were good and true, and I absolutely cannot condone many of the things they now think are positive goods.

At least my family has managed to stay close and caring.

Don’t get me started on the word ‘bromance’.

How about “fully armed and operational extended family.”

I’m afraid this extended family will be fully operational when your friends arrive

MVT,
Tell me more

“Don’t be too proud of this genealogical terror you’ve constructed: the ability to go across the street to Grandma’s is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”

I feel like mainstream culture has neglected the extended family (I need to modify my hashtag because I used multi-generational when I also mean same generation relationships like cousins). The nuclear family is the standard (not that it isn’t important), but to me the family is at it’s best when there’s also strong bonds to grandparents, great aunts and uncles, and plenty of cousins etc. This is a topic that’s been on my mind for years but it was Friday night that I started publicly (on the internet I mean) talking about it. Next morning I see you’ve posted about the extended family too. I’m still not exactly sure how syncs work but I really hope it means more people will start seriously thinking about it and talking about it. And I like Zen’s example of the Addams Family.

Sorry, I’m sure people have heard of these before, but in my social media group we like to talk about how wealth is not just material possessions. So we have sayings like “Health is wealth”, “culture is wealth” and “family is wealth”. I’m trying to take that last one to the next level: extended family is wealth!

As a young child in the 1960’s (being raised Protestant until we converted to LDS in my late adolescent years) I used to think that the Addams Family tv show was scary and full of weirdness that outdid anything in my own extended family by orders of magnitude.

Oddly, in the past couple years, my dear wife got me into watching that show again and I have realized they are probably the most family-oriented program in history of US TV, as comments above intimate. Or has the world shifted around us that much and it’s relative?