Dysfunctional is the New Functional

It is the Monday before Thanksgiving. The wind is whipping around the houses and makings a howling whistling sound that would feel more at home in horror movies. It has me thinking about family and stress.  I would like to call it holiday stress, because this sort of stress only comes around the holidays.  Like many  people out there, I come from a dysfunctional family. I am not saying they are bad people.  They aren't.

My mother would a give a stranger the shirt off her back to help. My grandfather is kind to strangers and will talk to anyone. My grandmother feeds stray  cats.  I have a dozen aunts and uncles that I mostly only see through Facebook that are involved in the community, being positive role models and are being productive members of society.  They are not bad people, but just like the wind, they are a force to be reckoned with.

The one thing that all my family members have in common is that we all have strong personalities. These personalities don't always mesh well with each other.  So, if you are thinking of having that I am having one those Hallmark moment normal Rockwell like holidays, where all the family meets up at Grandma's house and gorge ourselves on ham and biscuits and pie. It isn't going to happen. Those expectations can cause a person to be stressed or depressed. I try to be neither.  It is easy to stress myself out trying to make it a cookie cutter moment and be everything that is in the script for Miracle on 34th Street, or I can be depressed that my family aren't members of the Get Along Gang and the only reasons we might be in the same room with each other would require a corpse.  It is so easy to swing between the two strong emotions. I know that there are other families like mine out there.  Dysfunctional is the new functional.

I am going to attempt the third option between stressed and depressed, and it is acceptance. I am not going to try to change them or me. I am going to accept that they are good people and that most of the time I am good people. I am going to have patience.  I am going to accept what I can not change. That is not saying I am going to bend over backwards  and I am not going to ignore difficulties, but more like take a breathe and think about what I want and what is important and go from there.

I am going to call this my Plan B.  Accept what you can not change and move on. Dysfunctional is the new functional.