There Is No Referee in a Family

by John van Sicklen Maeck II

“Being harmed is something that happened. Victimhood can become somewhere you live.”

For years, I kept waiting for a referee in my family.

Not literally. I did not expect someone in a striped shirt to walk into the dining room and blow a whistle. But somewhere in me, I was waiting for an impartial person to arrive and say: This happened. That was unfair. You were hurt. You did not imagine it. Now let us make it right.

Courts have rules. They have evidence, procedures, judges, and appeals. I understand the attraction of that kind of order. A family has none of it.

There is no neutral official at the table. No one necessarily hears both sides. Sometimes no one ever delivers the verdict you have been waiting for.

I began to see that I had carried that missing courtroom with me into the rest of my life.

When something felt unfair in a relationship, at work, or in the world, I could become intensely engaged. I wanted justice, clarity, and correction. Those are not bad desires. But sometimes underneath them was an older wish: Somebody please tell me I was right.

That was harder to admit.

It is easy to believe that our anger is only about the present. Sometimes it is. Sometimes a present frustration opens a door into a much older room.

I began asking a question that changed the way I saw myself: Am I responding only to what is happening now, or am I also arguing an old case?

The question did not make injustice disappear. It did not require me to excuse anyone, abandon boundaries, or pretend that painful things were harmless.

It simply moved the point of inquiry. Instead of asking only, “Who is wrong?” I also began asking, “What is happening in me?”

Golf helped me understand this in a way philosophy could not.

When a golf shot goes badly, there are many available defendants. The club. The ball. The course. The wind. The person who taught you. Your back. Your age. Eventually, if you stay with the game long enough, you become interested in the person holding the club.

Not because every bad shot is your fault. Wind is real. Bad lies are real. Bodies age.

But the golfer is the only part of the shot I can actually work on.

That distinction became useful outside golf. Not everything that happens to me is my fault. But my response is the place where I have authority.

I also began to see the difference between having been a victim of something and building an identity around victimhood.

Being harmed is a fact about an event. Victimhood can become a way of organizing the future around that event.

The difference matters because the second can quietly keep the people who hurt us in control. If I need them to understand, apologize, change, or finally agree with my version of events before I can be at peace, then my freedom still depends on them.

This does not mean forgiveness on command. It does not mean reconciliation. Sometimes distance is wise. Sometimes the healthiest dance is the one you leave.

But if I am going to stay in the dance, I have found another useful rule: Find one thing you can like about the person, even if you think they are a doofus.

You do not have to approve of them. You do not have to deny their behavior. But finding one human quality you can appreciate may help you dance better.

The point is not to make everyone lovable. The point is to stop making hatred the price of knowing that someone was wrong.

That realization changed something in my relationship with justice itself.

I still care about fairness. I still care about communities, families, institutions, and the ways people are treated. I still want to help where I can. But I am becoming more suspicious of compulsion.

Whenever I hear an inner voice saying, “I must fix this,” I try to become curious. Is this care? Is it responsibility? Or is an old part of me trying to rescue someone because I once wanted to be rescued?

The same question applies to love.

Another person can love me, but they cannot become the referee in a case that began before they arrived. If I ask a partner to prove that I am lovable, every phone call, delay, disagreement, or uncertainty can become evidence in a trial that never ends.

Love works better when it is not asked to serve as a verdict.

The most useful shift for me has been from prosecution to participation.

I do not need to put the world on trial every morning. I can notice what is happening, decide what belongs to me, set boundaries where I need them, help where I can, and work on the person holding the club.

When I feel myself becoming riled up, I now try to separate the present from the historical. What actually happened today? What older story did it awaken? Am I asking someone in the present to settle a case from the past? What action is mine to take now, even if no verdict ever comes?

Those questions do not always calm me down. They do something more useful: They return me to myself.

The child in us may still want a grown-up to enter the room and say what was fair. I have compassion for that child. He was waiting for protection.

But adulthood may begin when we understand that the referee is not coming.

That can sound bleak. I have come to experience it as freedom.

Nobody is coming to award me the life I should have had. I have this one. I can spend it arguing the old case, or I can decide what I want to make from here.

The world may still need changing. But the first place I know I can begin is closer.

Annoyingly close.

Here.

About the Author

John van Sicklen Maeck II is a San Francisco writer whose work explores family, aging, love, community, and the ways ordinary practices can become forms of self-inquiry. His writing moves between memoir, theatre, poetry, and reflective nonfiction, often using humor and everyday experiences—such as golf—to examine larger questions about how we live.

• family
• John van Sicklen Maeck II
• Judgment
• Referee