Real Families

We’re wounded even before we take our first breath. That’s because we have parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins and more. We’re born into and shaped by their wounds. Then many of us have children. And pass the wounds forward.

I remember watching each of my daughters take that first breath. So tiny. So fresh. So unmarked by life. That’s probably why babies can make you catch your own breath: The wounds are already upon them, but their bodies don’t know it yet. I remember hoping it would be better than it was for us. Joan and I were each fortunate to be born into families no worse than most and healthier than many.

But put just our two families together, look back a few generations, and between us we had been born into emotional abandonment, suicide, mental illness, early deaths of parents or siblings, remarriage, marital struggles, doctrinal splits turning family members into near-strangers and more.

If I were writing back when my daughters were unmarked, I’d have a cheerier report. Now they’re grown, and it’s clear: They too were born into wounds. I’m proud of how they’ve navigated their markings. Yet I grieve when they must work through frailties traceable to me or way back to a great-grandparent.

So is it hopeless? Each generation wounding the next forever? Partly yes. Look back at Genesis. Adam and Eve bear Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. Skip to Abraham and Sarah: Amid family troubles they bear Isaac.

Thinking God wants it, Abraham almost kills Isaac; who knows how that wounds.

Next Isaac and Rebekah bear Esau and Jacob. Jacob is born grasping Esau’s heel. Each twin becomes the favorite of one parent. One day, heel-grasping Jacob tricks Esau into selling his first-from-the-womb status as oldest son.

Jacob grows up. Now he wants Rachel but is tricked into first marrying Rachel’s sister Leah. Next come years of ruckus as a bevy of Jacob’s children sprout from wives and maids. Finally Rachel becomes pregnant with Joseph.

Eventually in this Genesis soap opera the story settles on Joseph, his father Jacob’s favorite son as Jacob was his mother’s. In his dreams Joseph’s family bows to him. Already jealous enough of their father’s favorite son, his enraged brothers sell him into slavery.

On it goes, until one day I’m born. You’re born. And onto our briefly unmarked selves fall wounds going back to the beginning.

Still there are reasons for hope. I suggest three. First, by the very act of naming wounds, we can start their healing. How the healing comes will vary. For me and Joan, a godsend was therapy. Early in our marriage we realized we were struggling—with each other, ourselves, raising our first baby. The gift of a Christian therapist couple appeared. Much of what they helped us do over the next seven years was name the wounds we had inherited and to aim not simply to pass them on.

That leads to the second cause for hope: Once we name the wounds needing healing, we can work at not passing them on. That lets the next generation gain a less wounded start. I see this in my daughters. All show family markings. But all seem less smudged than their parents.
Joseph in his own way intervened in generations of wounding. After his brothers sold him, he faced many miseries. But eventually he became a leader of Egypt during a time of famine. The famine drove his family to Egypt for food. They didn’t recognize magnificent Joseph, now grown.

Joseph must have been tempted to keep the wounding going, to thunder down that here they were, bowing as his dreams had predicted. And for a time he did trick them and lord it over them. But then, Genesis 45:1 says, “Joseph could no longer control himself …” and told his brothers who he was. So the brothers were reconciled: “And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them; and after that his brothers talked with him” (45:15).

Generations of rivalry and jealousy were healing. This is the kind of work we owe each other.
Joseph’s experience offers a third cause for hope: God can work through our wounds. Joseph can move beyond bitterness because, as he tells his brothers, God was in the journey their anger sent him on. On our own journey of dealing with wounds we will often come to see that from them God has wrested blessings.

The work is never completed and can create its own wounds, as when the move of Joseph’s reconciled family to Egypt sets them up to become slaves. But it is better to only partly lighten marks than never even to care that unless we name our smudgings, we’ll willy-nilly pass them on.