Bittersweet

It's New Year's Eve. I'm spending it quietly, at home with family. A few things occurred to me tonight I hadn't thought of before ... maybe because of the season, maybe because I was re-reading the blog I wrote for Christmas.

First, it occurred to me that our Tribe friends didn't know how to recreate "family" the way they experienced it before the Virus.

They tried. Trudy wanted so much to have a family the way her mom & dad made one. When she became afraid of life with Zoot (the father of her baby), she tried to force Bray into playing the daddy-role. And unfortunately that became the pattern: babies as leverage. Leverage against Bray. Leverage for the Chosen. I'm not saying Trudy was a bad mother ... it's just that definitions changed as the world changed.

When Amber had her baby, daddy Bray was long gone. Her baby became an excuse for Amber to keep other men at bay, an excuse for acquiesing to Techno demands (yeah, Technos knew how to use leverage against people too).

Family? We have mothers, and young men who are fathers; but it's a sense of family that's missing.

Sometimes a stronger family sense came between siblings. Patsy & Paul were inseperable until Paul "vanished." Alice & Ellie are a better example. Alice fought for her sister, even kidnapping Taisan so she could get the Virus antedote for Ellie to live.

After 5 seasons, we will never know how the rest of the growing years affected mothers & fathers & babies. If things continued the way they began ... well, I guess we have new definitions for "family" and "adolescence" and "adulthood."

And that points to the 2nd thing that occurred to me tonight.

Though I'm not a mother, I know the love and affection of children. I know the satisfaction of helping them gain understanding & faith in themselves. I know the distinctly bittersweet joy of watching them grow into confident young adults who are ready to fly. It's joyful because they reward all your faith in them. It's bittersweet because the time comes when it's you they're flying away from. But that's all right too.

It's New Year's Eve. My "children" are far away, but they're as close as my thoughts. They're in my heart.

Somewhere in Tribe-world, it would be nice to think that Amber and Trudy and all the others could say the same thing.

-Chyna

Photo source: copyright Cloud-9 "The Tribe"