Finding "Family" on Facebook

So as life becomes busier, I find myself with less time to spend blogging, or at any rate, less willing to indulge in blog-able thoughts. From time to time, I have a thought or idea and I think, "Hmmm. . . I could blog that. . ." but I find it difficult, I'm sorry to say, to commit to organizing my thoughts and expressing them in some way that makes them digestible to others. The same happens with meals, actually, which is when I pull out something boxed or frozen. So I've been on Facebook lately. Facebook allows me to quip something short and imperfect--something that hasn't been thought out, or is not expressed clearly. It's a type of self-indulgence for the writer, really. We invite others to finish our thoughts, or expand them into dialogues or conversations. Sometimes real information is conveyed. Other times, it is just play. We set "bait" and wait for others to bite. It doesn't always work--especially for me, I might add. But sometimes it's just nice to see that moment of the day, that joy, frustration, anxiety, boredom--articulated, made external, published. And it requires very little effort to do so--far less than a blog.

On Facebook, I have two groups of friends--those whom I know from high school and have only recently rediscovered (my reason for going on Facebook, actually) and friends that I know from grad school. It is very interesting to see some of the daily observations of people I haven't seen for 10+ years. (Okay, maybe closer to 15+ years, but who's counting?) Many of these seem cryptic to me--references to the lives that they have developed over the past decade and some. These snapshots of others' worlds--sometimes literal snapshots!--have a kind of homey appeal. I don't feel like a voyeur, although I barely know these people any more, and some I never really did know very well. Of course, like blogs, these are imperfect snapshots--they are chosen words and images that present a picture carefully selected by the author, whether the author does this consciously or not.

What strikes me most is the emphasis on family. Most--if not all--of the people I know on Facebook have jobs, careers, businesses, whatever one chooses to call them. . . They have external sources of income that require more or less time away from home and/or dedication of time, attention, and effort to work. I believe one of these people has a home business, but her "work" space--whether real or virtual--is separate from her family space. Sometimes the work/job/career and the family life are mentioned together, usually a comparison of the two, or an attempt to reconcile the two: So-and-so is frustrated by the kids who keep interrupting. . . So-and-so is home from work AGAIN with a sick child and bored because she can't go to work. . . (There's been a lot of childhood illness going around Facebook.) So-and-so is able to see her child on 22 webcams at the Big Brother nursery. . . There is quire a bit of complaining about children, in more or less harsh terms as determined by Christmas-break cabin-fever. Sometimes, I find it shocking that the children are being spoken of so publicly in such harsh terms, though I recognize the reality of the frustration. It's the choice to publish such sentiments openly that shocks me. In these snapshots of people I used to know and their families whom I probably will never know, there is nevertheless an underlying warmth directed toward the smaller members of the species. They love their families. They live for their families. They work for their families. They find fulfillment in their families.

I am not in the position to contrast anyone's actual family-centeredness. However, the way this is communicated--seemingly so effortlessly--is something I have missed for many, many years. For the first time--oh, perhaps ever--I actually wish I had stayed closer to these people so that I could have known people my own age who were starting and growing families--starting and growing families for the sake of doing so, and seeing that in itself as a--perhaps as THE means to personal fulfillment, whatever importance work/job/career might have. I actually wish I had remained friends with other mommies because they are mommies, not because we have that--and some other philosophical, intellectual, or experiential commonalities. But that's not really the whole story. I want the whole picture. I wish that I had stayed in touch so that our children could attend one another's birthday parties or exchange presents at Christmas. So that we could have Christmas parties and Easter egg hunts. Not so that we could share mommy-experiences while the kids were occupied for a while.

It's funny how I will always think of these women as "girls." One of these "girls" has two girls--one about the age of my son, who turns 12 very soon. She is a year or two older than me--as everyone was back then--and she was married a bit before me. And she was into the mommy thing waaaay more than me back then--I saw her once when she was pregnant and she was practically knitting booties everywhere she went--like Darling in Lady and the Tramp. But the fact remained that she was living a family life all of these years, and, well, that does something.

What I'm trying to articulate is a way of looking at life that is somehow distinct from how I've looked at life until now, but which represents in some ways how I've lived life (without thinking of it in these terms) for the past 12 years. Perhaps it's more of a way of looking at marriage. What is a marriage, really? Is it a partnership? Is it an economic or social contract? Is it an intimate friendship? I look at these former friends and acquaintances, and it doesn't appear that marriage functioned exclusively--or primarily--in any of these ways for them. Nor was marriage simply something that they checked off the list of "things to do" before a certain age; nor was it a means to status, or a life goal in itself. No, in these people I recognize ambitions beyond marriage and family. But neither do I see marriage as an end in itself.

In fact, I do not see marriage as an end in itself. Marriage, in the culture in which I grew up, was a means to a family. Even in the case of a childless marriage, there could be the sense of a family rather than the eternal honeymoon of couple-ness. It is, perhaps, a state of mind. The collective is larger than the sum of the parts. We are not two, or three, or five people in the same house, although we are literally two, or three, or five people in the same house(hold). We are a family, which is larger. It has larger problems, perhaps, and frustrations, but also more capacity for love and survival. So these friends of mine did more than get married, have children, and careers. They allowed their lives to be shaped into families. And their families grew from the natural progression of their lives.