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The “not quite Hallmark” holidays with my family.

Relationships January 13 2025, Galina Singer

It’s been years since the five of us were together for the holidays.

So much has happened for each one of us since then.

My children became adults.

I died and re-built myself from scratch.

Looking back now, I see that this pause became a kind of a reset.

We had to explode apart, to break out of the stifling inherited paradigm of what it meant to be a family, full of suppression, repression, expectations and rules, and other people’s values.

Each one of us needed to leave the familiar, in order to understand who we were outside of serving as the puzzle pieces that made up the image of what it meant to be us.

As the girls were growing and rebelling and leaving and becoming themselves, I was dying and rebirthing, and also growing and becoming more authentically myself.

My relationship with Wladimir came under tremendous pressure to transform or die, and for a while no one knew how it would all end.

During those years it felt awkward and painful for the five of us to be together.

It was as if the puzzle pieces no longer fit. Each one of us was breaking out of the habitual shapes and patterns of behavior that held the old paradigm together. For a while, we did not know how to be together in a way that would allow space for who we were each becoming, without the violence of resorting to old shapes.

It did not feel good to be together for some time.

I was still without understanding of what to make of these seismic changes in myself and in my family life. I did not have access to the bigger plan then, and felt traumatized by the destruction of the world as I knew it. Habitually judging myself for everything, I experienced these changes as a personal failure.

For a while I simply could not face the pain of what my life had become. To give myself and everyone a break from suffering, I stopped insisting on family holidays.

This allowed us to start coming together not out of obligation, but because we wanted to, leading to opportunities for healing and creation of the new.

I appreciated getting to know each of my children separately, without their siblings. I saw how they each needed to be alone with me, have my undivided attention, tell me their stories, even grievances about the unfair treatments in the past.

During this privileged time alone with them, I started seeing their core wounds and relating patterns that emerged in our family set up and dynamic, which they continued working through in their relationships outside of the family.

As I was on my own journey of self-discovery and investigating the inherited trauma patterns, we began having different kind of conversations.

I was questioning and redefining what it means to love, to be in relationships, to be a family. I was breaking out of the outdated and obsolete notions of togetherness that came out of generations of trauma, fear, worry, scarcity and the need to conform which I inherited from my mother.

You are altogether?! How wonderful! Isn’t it wonderful?” – my mother exclaimed when we called her from our vacation in December. Seeing the girls on video, my mom asked them “Isn’t it so nice to be with mama?! Everything is better with mama.

The disconnect between my mother’s idealized vision of family relating and my actual lived experience of it since childhood always felt like a cognitive dissonance.

I wanted to say something rude that would yank my mom out of her La La Land, like: Actually, mama, life is not always better with mother. The girls do not always love to be together. I do not always feel more at peace when the girls are with me. It is great to be together, and it is also great when we are apart doing our own things.

And over these last few years I did express to her some of my own grievances and observations about family life, in order to proclaim my version of reality. She could never accept my experience and instead called me abnormal and judged me as a bad mother.

I remember how at 18 years of age I needed to get the hell out of my parents’ house, where my differences and opinions were shamed and my life force snuffed out.

So I always knew that my girls would need to go far away from me, too. In fact, I believe that everyone needs to leave the environment in which they were shaped as puzzle pieces to fit a family, so that we may find out who we actually are as individuals.

The five of us are now learning how to be together again

Thanks to all the dying and rebirthing I have been going through over the years, I am able to hold space and be non-judgmental witness to the dying and rebirthing of my girls and of my marriage.

We are co-creating the new version of what it means for us to be a family.

There is no formula. And the new version will not be static.

No, remaining a family is a journey, as all relationships invariably are.

To me, a healthy relationship is a container that allows for coming together of constantly changing and evolving individuals.

As such, I redefine family as a living breathing entity, serving to support the sovereignty and the continuous evolution of each individual.

This is very different from the families that demand to conform to tradition and the way things have always been done before, perpetuating intergenerational dysfunction by whipping everyone into shapes out of which they grew out long ago.

As children grow, I no longer believe in hierarchy within families. Every member is of equal importance.

Equitable relationships require a lot of spaciousness: space to come together and space to be apart. This allows breathing room for each member to remain attuned to themselves. So that relationship becomes a safe home, where each individual can express themselves to the best of their truth and dare to change, rather than slice pieces of themselves to maintain other people’s ideas of who they used to be.

I have been learning how to build a family that my children want to be a part of.

The nine days at the very end of 2024 that we spent the five of us together were not perfect, but they were precious.

Each one of us chose to be there. By the third day of being together some old dynamics started resurfacing that caused discomfort, even pain.

I faced some old pain points and observed dynamics within myself that I believed I had put to rest long ago. I remembered how overwhelming it is to my system when we are all together. How highly sensitive I am to my children’s energy, and how quickly I become hyper-vigilant to their needs at the expense of my own.

The role of the Mother to my outer children was frequently in conflict with the Mother to my own Inner child.

I was taught to mother from sacrifice. I notice how I still fall into that default setting when we are together, which invariably leads to depletion and resentment – if not of my children, then definitely of my husband.

After a few days I started taking space to be by myself, to return to my own inner child, noticing how extremely needy and anxious she becomes when I am mothering my outer children from that over-zealous mothering I inherited. There is a lot more to say about the conflict between our children’s needs and the needs of our own inner child. I will continue this theme in the coming weeks.

For now, I want to say that time with my family was raw and real.

It was not the Hallmark card nor the happily ever after. It was a work in progress.

It was messy, human, with ups and downs. Old buttons were pressed. Some of us were more aware of the internal process than others.

And then there were also beautiful moments that felt absolutely perfect, moments of attunement and simplicity and harmony.

And through it all I tried to remain a present non-judgmental home to myself, which allowed me to be that for my children.

I processed, I apologized when I was wrong – to myself and others – I communicated to the best of my abilities, I took time to rest and to compose myself to avoid further dysregulation and dissatisfaction that always follows depleted resources.

What helped while we were together as a family, was making space to connect with each one of my girls separately.

Family is built of individuals.

I want to cultivate meaningful, flexible, attuned relationships with each member of my family. To give to each of them according to their specific unique needs – what I tried but could not always do while we all lived together.

As I stand here today, I am so infinitely grateful. I knew that this family time would be my next layer of initiation into the depths. And I have so much new material for writing, as well as for creating new programs and retreats in the new year.

Stay tuned!

PS: Happy 2025!

We are in the middle of huge societal changes. The old definitions of family, parenting, relating, love are causing us much suffering and are begging to be redefined.

We have work to do – individually and collectively – to heal our relating trauma, so we may thrive in our togetherness.

I am grateful to be in the position to serve through guiding on this journey of learning to love. Please reach out for support if you feel you could use it. My calendar is open again. Schedule your free 30-minute Introductory conversation via zoom here.