When Your Family Doesn’t Look Like the One You Imagined

A friend sent a message recently after seeing something about “well-functioning homes.”

It had pricked her heart.

Why, she wondered, did things like that bring up envy and guilt? Why did they make her question herself and the family she had worked so hard to build?

I understood exactly what she meant.

Because somewhere along the way, most of us form a picture of what our family will look like someday.

We imagine adult children who still want to come home. Relationships that become easier with time. Shared traditions, maybe shared beliefs. We imagine ourselves looking around one day and thinking,

Yes. This is what all those years of parenting were for.

And then our children grow up.

They become people with their own convictions, relationships, priorities, struggles, and choices. Some choose differently than we hoped they would. Relationships change. Families go through seasons when everyone feels close, and seasons when they don’t.

Sometimes the distance between what we imagined and what actually grew can hurt.

Sometimes the distance between what we imagined and what actually grew can hurt.

As we talked, I told my friend something I have had to learn in my own family: I don’t regret trying to teach my children what I believed was good and true. I did the best I knew how to do.

But they have agency.

And loving them now requires me to respect that agency, even when I would have chosen differently.

Ironically, as I was writing about all of this, my husband and I were in an argument. We weren’t talking. Nothing catastrophic had happened. We’d be fine.

But at that particular moment, I’m not sure anyone would have looked through our window and labeled us a “well-functioning home.”

That’s life.

Families aren’t static enough to earn permanent labels like that. We have good days and terrible ones. Sometimes we move two steps forward and one step back.

And, as another friend quickly reminded me, sometimes an entire year feels like a landslide backward.

Maybe that’s why I’m becoming less interested in whether a family looks successful and more interested in what happens when things don’t go according to plan.

Do we repair?

Do we keep listening?

Can we tell the truth without withdrawing our love?

Can we allow the people we love to become people we didn’t entirely anticipate?

Can we grieve what we hoped for without missing what is still here?

PeaceTree begins with honoring “the reality of where a family actually is, not where we wish they were.”

Maybe part of doing that is admitting that we sometimes need to mourn the family we imagined.

Not because we don’t love the family we have.

But because letting go of the picture may finally free us to see the people standing in front of us.

And then the question becomes less:

How do I get my family to become what I thought it would be?

And more:

Given the family we are today, how do I want to show up in it?