Family Portrait

This subject has been bugging me lately: family! Why is it so important? Why people keep saying one day I will have one of my own when I say I don't want one since I believe I already have one family...so only if there is kids in it and if they get out of you , you have a family? I don't get it. They say that's a normal thing to do, but seems like it is not something you feel in your heart that you should do..."family is everything", "you wanna be alone all your life?"....let me confess you something, I live with my family for 2 and half decades...and an year, and I have a particularly tense relationship with my dad, we don't have a conversation like in 15 years without based in arguments and with him making me feel worthless...sometimes I think he does hates me and blames me for having this stupid normal suburbian life, he actually chosed in first place, I don't talk to my sister more than a polite uneventful "Good Afternoon", "hi" when she comes around sometimes because she studies in other place far from my home...we had a pretty rough and violent fight almost 4 years ago and I decided that if we couldn't get along, we should stop talking once and for all, so at first I was really mad at her, but now we just ignore each other and pretend we are strangers...actually no, we are strangers...with my mum at least I have a better relationship, I also loved my deceased grandfathers, although I just saw one of them once in an year, I like my two grandmothers still, but my cousins, aunts and uncles...well half of my family lives far and if we see each other once in a year that's enough, the other part who lives nearby we are really not that close. Also my mum has 4 sisters and a brother and they live far from each other it's true but they haven't what you can call a relationship, they never had.
What I am just wondering is...people get a brand new family hoping to kill their lonneliness but sometimes what happens is that we actually can live decades together, sharing the same place everyday and still have no clue who are those persons, I really feel like we are strangers and honestly it hurts me living this way...it started all so great when we were kids you know but then when I get to be a teenager was a huge gap between me and my family, we started distancing ourselves so much that we came to this state we never can talk to each other without just arguing or provoking each other...I mean we used to be an happy family when I was a kid, but nowadays we spend all our days in separeted divisions of the house, and my father always stays in the couch looking angry and resentful to the television and goes away when I enter in the living room, for years he has been leaving the dinner and lunch in the middle of another failed attempt to have lunch or family dinner, actually sometimes I wait for him to finish the meal first than me so he doesn't blame me for not finishing his lunch or dinner and call me unbearable or that he can't stand my voice or my silence...whatever he wants to implicate with. One of the worst things he did to me was when I was really depressed (I was 16) and sad and confessed to my mum I wanted to die and/or maybe commit suicide and she just told my dad and instead of trying to understand what made me feel this way he came to me and slapped me violently in my face saying "who the hell did you wrong?", that ruined all the remaining hope and trust I had in him, I understood I could never tell anyone, specially parents how sad and depressed I felt because they would not understand and maybe hit me, also when I turned vegetarian he did not approve my life choice and always said that kind of nourishment could give me a blood cancer (leukemia) so maybe he was worried about my health and wanted to changed my mind but I was so mad at him and trusted almost nothing in his person that all I understood was "he hates me so bad he wants me to die", it did not help the fact he added "and when you will be sick I will not visit you in the hospital!"....he kept saying this things on mode repeat day by day, I really thought he hated me...so when he got a cancer in his intestines 6 years ago I did not visit him in the hospital...I just came once or twice because other members of my family really made me go and one of this days was his birthday, when he tried to talk to me and I was already gone, just said "yes,no,yes,no,yes", I wanted him to feel what he made me feel when he said those horrible things to me, I wanted him to know "you are the one who is sick and now it is me that is not going to see you in the hospital!"...because he made feel deeply in my heart that he hated me and wanted me to be sick and die....fortunatelly he healed himself even with chemeotherapy (something that my 19 year old cousin was not lucky enough to escape from...he died 2 year ago)...but I gave him no moral support, he must have felt alone and that I hated him too, when I really didn't. I think parents have to be more cautious with the way you speak to your kids, all this kinds of shit talk literally can lead to misunderstandings of feelings and drive families appart. I don't want to blame my family for my trust issues or depressions I had and sometimes have but I know it has something related to them in it. I guess my father wanted me to be better and more competitive in school by trying to motivate me by saying "that was not good enough!", "is that all you can do?", sometimes he was ridiculous enough to go to my school checking my colleagues notes writting them down and saying that others were better than me, they had bertter grades than me...even if my grades were good, there was always someone better, so I always felt worthless no matter how hard I tried he was never happy for me...also he said I could never get in my degree and once I got in he always put me doubts in my head if I ever could finish it, just drop it or if I ever can actually do something with my degree...or life. The saddest part is if I try to give him my version of the story he denies it...did he really forget about it or just pretends he never made mistakes when "educating" me?, he never admits he is wrong, so I just keep treating him the same way he does and he says to my mum he thinks I hate him...well I don't, but if you seed indiference and make me feel worthless my indiference is all you reap, and you just reap what you sow.  I really think the way you speak to your kids becomes their inner voices...in all those self-doubt thoughts I have I know there is something of my dad in it...actually sometimes is like he is yelling in my head...
What I really wanted to say is that it doesn't matter if you get married for 10,20,30,40,50,60 years and have kids to avoid feeling alone, sometimes your own family makes you feel deeply alone and sad. They are actually the persons I care the most in my life, maybe because of our history...but if so, why can't we get along? I still don't know why...all I know is altough people talk about family being the most important thing in life, it is the family that usually hurts you the most and causes you a pain no one else can cause. So I just concluded like always life usually sucks, most friends are pointless, family is a lie that hurts and the only thing true and that I count with in this world is myself.
Usually all family portraits we see depict happy families...it is far from that perfect, sometimes it is nothing but fake. Nowadays we never take family portraits but in my old family portraits, I remember living those moments, and I remember one day we were happy...I wish we could back to that.

Confessions from another broken home.