To the Mentor: Can't Choose Your Family
We've all heard the old line, "You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family..." (And we have cringed with uncomfortable agreement! (But for OTHER folks' families, of course).
Well, it's true—you have the family you have, for better or worse. But is that all there is to family, especially considering the brokenness, dysfunction, and sometimes profound alienation? Of course some families are experienced like a life-giving oasis in a dry, energy-sapping world, but even the best families have bad days...or months...or years. But is fatalism and sad resignation the only way to “do family?”
I'd like to offer an alternative view to the Charlie Brown Halloween view of family: "I got a rock" (of a family), hearkening to his consistent bad luck in the Trick-or-Treat ritual of getting rocks in his bag instead of goodies.
My view: You can't choose your family, but you can choose from among your family.
One of the fallacies I have tried to correct when I have tried to awaken folks to becoming mentors is the belief that they first must have been mentored by someone else. It's helpful but not necessary. If we all waited to mentor after someone mentored us, not many would ever start nor benefit. There's another way.
You can begin to practice. There's one place I recommend you start: your family.
While no family is perfect, we all WISH our family was and that wish is an under-tapped resource for hope and motivation. So what if YOU took the initiative to contribute to your family's prospects for being better than its been by courageously choosing from among its many members to ensure that at least one, or two, or even 12 or 37 over a lifetime have at least one person who wants them to win in life.
And why not choose someone in your family to practice mentoring?
Family is Near...Little Permission Required. Several folks who attend the mentor training I conduct often ask: "Where do I start? Where do you find protégés, potential mentees?" Well, prospects are born everyday...into families. Think about your role in your family this way: when you were young, would you have benefitted from a safe, kind, and serious offer of help from an older brother or aunt? If that cousin, the one who passed his swimming or math or Boy Scout test with flying colors had offered, "Hey, you wanna learn how to do this?" wouldn't you have thought the offer over a bit? Would it have made you feel special if your grandmother had picked you to learn to bake with her? If that future school teacher big sister came home from college one summer and said, "Would you mind too much if I start helping you get ready for your high school exams?" You see, because a family is near they know the kinds of things you need, the things you're good (lousy) at, and they can partner with you...well...forever.
Family is Clear...You Belong. Growing up in a rough-and-tumble-world, where dog-eats-dog and few have time for stragglers, it's hard to know where you stand or even where you can stand. Family is one if those gifts that is so abundantly pervasive that it hides in plain sight. We forget we belong somewhere, to someone (or at least we should, though there are cases where a separation of some kind has broken that chain of natural belonging). In a world that divides itself between insiders/outsiders, us/them, eat/be eaten, our best ideal of family is that we are insiders to someone. Every friend of mine whose early family story is broken testifies that although the parent died, divorced, departed, or dragged, the child still carried a secret wish that it might have been, should have been, maybe will be otherwise. The family member who surveys their kin and offers the gift of belonging, in the most appropriate of manners, will nurture and satisfy that impulse to belong, and from that impulse may launch a life into a star-flung trajectory that may not have ever been possible otherwise.
Family is Dear...At Least it Can Be. If you haven't noticed, I'm a realist about what happens in families. The most deplorable crimes in all of history are made more heinous when they break out between fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, man and wife. These things ought not to be, but they are. In fact, we are most aghast when such ruptures occur "between blood and blood," because family is SO dear. We expect more from family. So, since this is so, why not make mentoring your method within your family? Why not add high intentionality to the development of everyone who bears your name, your lineage, your legacy of a shared history? Let it not be said that you went out into the highways and byways offering your best insights, evaluation, tricks of the trade to mere strangers, paid employees, troubled addicts, or local Girl Scout troops. These are, after all, someone else's kids!
Family is Here...Forever. Picking up where we left off just now...WHILE you mentor someone else's kids—young and old—choose some of those kids whose stories you have seen from the beginning and may see unfold over a lifetime. Most of us who have worked inside corporate environments have experienced training events that require a group to sit in a room all weekend, it's called a retreat—mostly a day of working in some other square room—and the result of such a day is a "10-year plan." What I want to hear about is the 500-year plan! Family is the 500-year plan! Your family came from somewhere, your family is somewhere, and your family is going somewhere. Your family is history; it doesn't just have a history. Make history by making a commitment to your family's well-being through the gift of intentional relational investment that advances all that your family members can be. Family is too dear to miss pledging yourself to the success of those who may know you the longest and dearest.
Sure, you can't choose your family the way you can choose your friends, but you can choose from among your family to ensure that their lives matter, that their lives make it, and that their family—although not likely to be perfect—is on its way to be more than it might have been.
