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I have had cause to think abut family dynamics of late. I am reminded of the times I have been told of the perception that the "traditional" WASPy middle-class family does not have a strong sense of family, that the relationships among cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandchildren are not as integral for them as for some other groups. (The names of those groups vary; I have heard it from many people.) And I have to admit that my own experience largely supports the assertion; I grew up largely disconnected from my broader extended family, and even from large parts of the more local relations. Some of the latter has to do with age differences--many of those cousins are a decade or more older than I am--and some with the simple facts of personality differences. Some, though, is the hermit-like demeanor of many of my relations; they like to be off by themselves, away from others. It is an inclination that I share in large measure.

Some of the divergence is a matter of work, though. I know that I have moved several times to follow paychecks. From the Central Texas where I grew up and where my parents and brother still live to Hub City to The City and Bedfordside Garden to Sherwood Cottage where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, I have left where my family lives to make my professional way. Even now, I am a day's drive away from where I grew up, but it is the closest to where I grew up that I have lived since 2005. My parents live in the Hill Country for much the same reason: following work. It is why they left the Midwest of their youth and moved south. (Yes, I know that both they and I followed love--they filial, I romantic--amid the moves. But even those moves were bound up in working.)

It seems to me that the call of the paycheck--more generously, the focus upon the craft embedded in employment--has much muted the voices of blood and affection, which underpins the oft-heard complaints of moral degradation among "kids these days" at this point. But I have to consider also that those voices have not been as loud in the ears of others as they have in mine; while some may lament the "loss" of "family values" as indicated by the increasing atomization of bloodlines, there have to be some instances in which it is to be praised. There is more freedom to leave bad situations now than there was in the past, when "we fixed what was broken instead of throwing it away"; I do not think so much work was done to fix problems as ignore them, which does not make them disappear. (And given how much fixing costs, much more than replacement, and over a longer period, the economics of such decisions make sense--for those who need that kind of argument made.) Again, THIS IS NOT HOW IT IS FOR ME. But it is how it is for others, and so even if I may lament my own separation and try to bridge it across a shifting distance, I cannot say that it is always an ill. And I do not think other ought to, either.