Family | Day 85 of my 2023 Journal

My sister has arrived with her family, and we are so happy.

So happy, I forgot to take pictures, so this one is all I have.

Our relationship with my sister's family is amazing, and we are so happy to see them. But happy family relations are a rare thing these days, so I want to reflect on it for a bit.

Ever since work became something removed from the home and amplified by the invention of kindergarten, families have been suffering. With the epidemic of divorces, things got worse.

Now, let's be clear. I am all for women doing what they want including working, and I am pro divorces as I am against constraints on personal freedom. But at the same time, I am sure, something is wrong with the way we have been doing things for the past 150 years.

A lot has improved, but the cost is high, and we have to find a better balance.


When I grew up, my parents divorced before I started school. I loved my (by then) only brother deeply, but only got to see him in the afternoons.

With my parents' new marriages, I had new siblings. On one end, it was amazing, as my father married my best friend's mother, and on the other end, it never worked.

When I was 11 my mother had another child, my sister who is now spending her vacation with us in Toscana. I held my sister close when she came. And we are still close. But we still grew up in a home, where everyone left in the morning and came back in the afternoon. The community was built during the summer Holidays.

There was a lot of love, surely. Everyone did their best. But it is hard to create a space of unconditional love, of “we have each other's backs” when the majority of waking hours are spent away from each other, when everyone comes back in the afternoon with different experiences when we don’t SEE and FEEL what is going on.

I believe human beings are meant to be together in close relations with loved and trusted and well-known communities of close family and neighbors.

Our psyche evolves, stabilizes, and thrives with other people.

We are supposed to be close to our parents, siblings, children, spouses, cousins, and friends.

Family is important. We have to take it seriously.

Love and light

Cecilie Conrad

# 85 of my 2023 writing challenge - Read them all here