A’Driane Nieves shares the journey of establishing and following a family charter.
While living this way has become our default over the last few years, I won’t pretend that it’s easy to do. Making personal, career, financial, political, parenting, marital, and other life choices and decisions, based on our family charter, sometimes requires sacrificing what may be most convenient. Sometimes it means skipping the quick fix in the short term, for what’s best for us, individually and as a family, in the long term. Sticking to it while also revising it, as our lives take shape on the foundation we’ve built, takes an incredible amount of work. It also requires vulnerability, transparency, trust, and some pretty frank conversations. There are times we have been able to work through charter-based decisions on our own, but there have been other times, where having those conversations led to working through issues that required the expert guidance of a therapist.
Our family has been building a charter. It is mostly a matter of codifying it for our shared understanding, but it also has to be said that there isn’t really such a thing as an “unspoken understanding” when it comes to folks’ personal desires and drives.
The fun and scary part is all the speculation on where we will end up. We are pretty open to the world, but the world doesn’t always seem as inviting…