Good Moring Digital Neighbors! Happy Sunday Friends, Refugees, Phamily, Triggeratti, Dawn Patrol, Early Birds, Fascinating People, Joyful Bigots, Conversants and Lurkers! If you celebrated Christmas, I hope it was a good one. Mine was more on the quiet side, and I was thankful for that since I was running low on the energy. I remained home, visited with some friends via Zoom, had my Christmas Feast of Kraft (substitutes will not pass) Macaroni & Cheese and a kraft beer, and watched most of It's A Wonderful Life after a good nap. All in all a good solid Christmas. I will visit my sister & brother-in-law today for a smaller family Christmas, everyone seems to be going in different directions this year. There are also the undercurrents of the omegatron variant or whatever it is called as well as the some of the vaxxed & unvaxxed tensions.

The Sunday after Christmas in Cath-O-land is the Feast of the Holy Family. Catholics and other Christians celebrate the life of Jesus with Mary & Joseph. Happy feast Day to my fellow disciples! Not a lot to know about that hidden life, since the accepted Gospels don't tell us much more than the incident when Jesus is 12. There are a number of Gnostic Gospels that tell us more about the life of Young Jesus and His Amazing Friends, but those were rejected by the Ancient Churches as Biblical Fake News. They make for some interesting reading with a very biblical vibe to them. Found on Amazon, what isn't?

Families - More people to seem to have complicated and difficult relationships than happy & health ones. There are many more ways for things to go wrong than for things to go well when it involves humanity. If 75% or higher of your family relationships are relatively healthy & happy, I bet you are among the rare ones. Celebrate that and strive to maintain it, it takes little effort for things to go sour. The % of how things can go right is much lower for so many more.

From my limited seat of listening to others, many more have very shattered and broken relationships with family members. Selfless Effort, self-awareness, the ability to resolve wounds and take personal accountability for all the water under the bridge often goes unaddressed. Family members in positions of authority rarely want to address the misuse or abuse of that authority. Scapegoating of outliers in the family is frequent as a way to encourage the "WE is greater than you" vibe that can create a silent enforcement of acceptable behaviors and topics in the relationships. It is easy to see why many opt out of family relationships or set up very limited interactions.

So much weight and expectation in families, too often it is unexpressed and just presumed that growing up in the family was enough to understand the dynamics and rules of the road. Healthy/Good families seem to find ways to express the bonds that join them while difficult families often don't have a clue. Therapy, 12 Step programs, good mentors in life, good books or other media can help one step out of the stream to examine it. Mentors, Therapist and Sponsors often seem the surest bet to me, since you can dialogue with them in your questioning and growing understanding, that can rarely be done with a book or static media.

It all begins with knowing yourself better, I doubt we can know ourselves completely, but so many seem to make the life trip with very limited self-awareness, few self questions and a reluctancy to look under the hood. Healthy families give one the grounding to engage that quest, unhealthy families don't even know it exist.

I'm thankful for the mixed bag of my family. An alcoholic father and bi-polar mother made for some fun shenanigans in the Miller household. I am thankful that at the end of their lives I got to know both of them better. I consider myself among the fortunate. Sure, there were many unaddressed issues and insufficient time and tools to work through all of it but some of the basic were covered, a fair number of wounds were healed and some understanding was gained.

Jesus, Mary & Joseph, pray for us. Happy Sunday my friends and thanks for indulging me this long if you read it all. A friend of mine commented on these stream on consciousness posts and I was very humbled. I also laughed because he gently pointed out the numerous typos and grammatic errors that abound in them. I often have to go back and edit to make sure I typed what I intended. It can be a tiresome exercise correcting Morning Tom by the more alert and Later Day Tom. 😊 Hopefully the context conveys the meaning and intention of these open sessions of my heart and head.