I'm only going to comment on one family member. My father. If you don't want to read all of what I have to say below, the important thing to take from it is this: My father is not a man in my eyes, and I resent him because of it.
Growing up, my father was pretty much extremely volatile and abusive emotionally towards myself, my mother, and my brothers. When I was a child, I feared him. When my mom died, a shift occurred in him, and for a couple of years, he was actually a pretty cool guy. Then he sort of settled down into his misery and he has become the biggest ***** I know. And I truly and honestly mean that. He will go on tangents of the most mindless complaints. Rather than shutting up and fixing an issue, he will complain about it in a very hostile and angry way, and it comes across as extremely petty and pathetic. In retrospect, he was always the way he is now. I just viewed it differently when I was smaller and much less threatening to him. My father and I have gotten into a few physical altercations and he has since learned to not push things too far with me. I am bigger and much, much stronger than him.
I was always jealous for the guys growing up with fathers that were actual fathers to them, and I don't mean buddy-buddy fathers. I mean men in their life that they respected, admired, and aspired to be like. In addition to all of the parental tasks and responsibilities, I think that is what a father should be; just as I think a mother should be the same. I don't view my father to be much of a man, and never viewed him as a role model. Growing up, I lacked a tremendous amount of masculine influence, because my relationship with my father was never there. Even when I was younger and engaged in many sports, there was a disconnect between the two of us. I gravitated towards women, and generally steered clear of male relations. I struggled a lot with dealing with a lot of male oriented thinking, particularly in sexual nature, that I feel wouldn't have been so difficult for me if my relationship with my father was more of a positive one. This alone dripped into many facets of my life and is hard to fully explain what I mean by that, because it is multi-layered. All this is the biggest gripe, over any way he treated myself, or the way he acts in general.
Things have since changed in that frame of my life. I found male role models outside of my family, and have come into manhood on my own, so to speak, and my relationships with other men are positive, and seem to flourish much more readily than my relationships with females, which is a change to how it was growing up. I feel I have a pretty firm grasp on my own male identity and masculinity, which I think is very important. I no longer feel ashamed, and have gotten over some problems in sexuality that made it difficult for me to explore that aspect of life.
My relationship with my dad is a negative one. On a fundamental level, I still love and minimally respect him; just because he is partially the reason I exist. I help him when he needs help, and I have found that since I have entered the working world, he needs my help much more than I need his. He relies on me for things that I honestly feel that parents should never rely on their children for for a simple fact that I would find myself incredibly ashamed in myself if I was a father and relied on my son for the things he does. And while I do wish my relationship with my father was never this way, it has taught me a lot about when I become a father and how I will raise my son.
