We hear a voice with the reverberance of our uttering. We see eyes and we hear ears so like our mothers’ and fathers’, aunts’ and uncles’, grandmothers’ and grandfathers’. We may see ourselves in others in ways that we do not always like or we may feel alienated from those who are supposed to be closest to us. Our love language may be of opposite poles and paint the spectrum from white to black. But the uniqueness of family heartstrings is that there lies an embedded chamber that lives and breathes osmotically in every one of us. It is a resilient, beating chamber that breathes acceptance and differences, flaunts opinions, speaks minds, resonates with heartache and sorrow, and not be punctured by the trivialities of human drama. The chamber is elastic and has the quality to absorb multi-directional pressure. It gives way for tugging and pushing and kicking and bickering and yet, the ethereal heartstrings will quietly gather themselves again and again, to weave the delicate pieces and mend the network – to tie us together, to achieve symbiosis and to remind us of the core meaning of family.
These heartstrings forge the fibre of our roots and define our existence. In the face of the grand and raw truth, there is genuineness in George Eliot’s words.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness to it. Nature, that great dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle and divides us by a subtler web of our brains, blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every moment.
Bon Jovi couldn’t express it truer from his heart, a songwriter and singer who has been through an incredible life journey to write songs that give depth and meaning:
Fathers love daughters like mothers love sons
They’ve been writing our story before there was one
From the day you arrive, ’til you walk, ’til you run
There is nothing but pride, there is nothing but love
They can offer advice that you don’t wanna hear
Words that cut like a knife and still ring in your ear
You think of them ignorant, they think of you arrogant
If you need evidence, who gave you confidence?
A snap of the finger, and you’re not a child
But you’re still holding on as you walk down the aisle
When they give you away to hear someone else say
That someone will love you ’til their dying day
You can choose to remember or choose to forget
If they took you to school or they tucked you in bed
You can say it don’t matter, you won’t do the same
You’d think no one noticed when you looked away
Now they’re getting older and you ain’t so young
So you take care of them like your daughters and sons
You can ask for forgiveness, they could ask for the same
Forget all the anguish, the heartache, the pain
Wherever you go or wherever you’ve been
It’s them that is with you, and that’s you that’s with them
Fathers and daughters and mothers and sons
As one story ends, another’s begun
Oh, fathers love daughters like mothers love sons
They’ve been writing our story before there was one
From the day you arrive, ’til you walk, ’til you run
There is nothing but pride, there is nothing but love
From hello to goodbye, that’s the story of love,
That’s the story of love.
Songwriters: Jon Bon Jovi / Richard Sambora / Ted Nugent / Dave Armato
