My Own Private Normal

<p style=”clear: both”>So if I still kept a memory book, there was a day a week or two ago when my teenaged (!)(*) son said something that would surely have gone in it. He uses Twitter, and told me that sometimes when he looks at Raven’s and my tweet-streams he feels like the luckiest kid he knows because his parents are so articulate and witty and smart. Which just shows how low his standards are, right? Only there are days when I think I can almost see the thoughts behind the impassive mask, the “Oh, if only I had a normal family!” Which. It might be half the intense recollection of that age, and half the flash one day of thinking how normal and right that thought is, because it means your family is okay enough that all of your energy isn’t invested in defensively insisting everything is great. An insight that must have followed, shortly, the catching of my breath when I watched the lovely movie Off the Map, to think how much you must take for granted in order to wish for things to be different.

And that movie, the current intense reading of the novel Juniper Tree Burning, the realization that there is a whole subgenre of hippie childhood memoirs, the running interest in the sort of history of the assumptions behind families that Stephanie Coontz writes about, has my journal all filled up with what the myth of the normal family means to me, and the way each generation gets to believe it is inventing a new way of doing things beyond the previous generation’s notion of normal, about the hubris of believing that I can intellectually, carefully select my own norms as the ones most rational, most conducive to health and well-being, shaving my legs but not wearing high heels (even beautiful two-toned strappy ones) forgetting to bother with makeup, but having fun with henna in my hair. I still carry hurt feelings that a friend looked at the clothing rack we put up in the bedroom to make up for the single solitary small closet we have and helpfully started telling me how to put drywall up and make a new closet in that corner (which two months later? I know I need to get over as I know no offense was intended, at all. Just. She couldn’t live as we do. Advice not the same as a referendum.) And still I dwell on the inscrutability of all our strange little domestic sine qua nons and the traditions we are able to shed without tears, the convictions behind such things as the proper way to load the dishwasher, toilet paper over vs. under, how the bed is made, and yet being able to joke about antimacassars or the plastic coverings on furniture in the homes of elderly relatives. This summer’s reading of Paul Fussell’s Class convinced me some of it is a class inheritance, but so insidious we don’t ever really get to free ourselves from it.

And then. There’s the whole family thing. I’m still feeling mellowed and grateful from a lovely visit with my parents over Thanksgiving. And the night before Thanksgiving we did a birthday dinner for Søren and got to introduce my parents to a handful of the people who are sort of my family of choice in Portland, the ones who love me, love my children, and show up when need them, and having all those people in a room was particularly sweet.

So I share with you, from my journal on Thanksgiving morning, my own private Thanksgiving fable, the persons in it resembling in no way any relative of mine by blood or marriage, living or dead:

Thanksgiving, the holiday for which my cynicism cannot bear to show its face, that to be thankful seems finally to be our best human state, our most human posture, the pausing for breath and appreciation, surcease from want, from fear, thanksgiving its own springboard into acceptance, things not as I planned them, but as they are, and this holiday as one in a string of a lifetime of Thanksgivings.

The earliest childhood family dinners were all wrapped in the joy of your cousins to play with and adoring adults paying attention to you, and maybe getting older there was creeping awareness of tensions and how much work the whole thing was and how brutal the boy cousins’ fights could seem, which, after a couple of years, yielded to a gentle fantasy of families like on television or in the movies, a mythical family in matching sweaters who all small nice and are nice to one another, belief that around other dining room tables gathered collections of even just normal people, not so flawed or idiosyncratic, without gaping flaws, insensitivity, dinners characterized by the complete absence of anyone talking too much, alcohol-induced oversharing, or hidden barbs. It occurs to you that even as a little kid you saw bluff heartiness like a neon sign, something missing here.

Perhaps in college there was a friend close enough that you got to spend Thanksgiving with them, and at first they seemed perfect, but maybe you suddenly catch her mother trying to embarrass her father or one of them cannot let got of little things, is too precise with the table settings. Maybe you even miss your own family. Maybe it’s the year you take Psych 101 and get excited about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and you slowly realize the the human fabric is woven with a pattern of warps and holes, and the gaping flaws, that if they aren’t universal in their expression, point to a universal underlying neediness, that the terse, purse-lipped aunt with the disapproval lines where other people have laugh lines and the uncle who works a little too hard to get everyone to like him (and pulling his finger is never going to work on that count) the odd collections of bragging or insisting on being an expert on everything that otherwise nice-seeming people will bring to the table, are all expressions of the need for love, security, approval.

You may even get just a tiny bit depressed at the futility of transcending the crazy family behaviors that are at once embarrassing and exasperating, especially when you realize it isn’t just your family. The loss of the mythical normal family is a little painful, because, then all you can aspire to, really, is a more benign form of crazy, right? You still love your family, that’s never really been in question, but the love is a sort of instinctual, habitual showing up at the ritualized occasions, and their very familiarity lies somewhere between comforting and constraining, especially when they refuse to see you as the person you really are, they keep wanting to remind you of your seven-year-old self, and at the end of weekends in childhood bedrooms or on fold-out couches you escape from their world back to your own with more relief than regret.

And then you meet someone, and you know he’s not perfect exactly, but you like who you are around him, and he makes you laugh. And he forgives you all the ways you’re not perfect. And he even likes your parents. And for not being perfect? He seems to have escaped many of the flaws that you see in the rest of humanity, has an attractive confidence, is kind and moral and would never cheat on his taxes, and the attention he gives you is flattering. Your infrequent quarrels are followed with a demonstration of a commitment to working it out, to honesty, to letting himself be vulnerable.

Then he gets a job offer far from where you’ve been living, and you must decide quickly, is this a person you can make a life with, and it occurs to you, really, that you cannot imagine life without him. You marry. You move. This is followed by a lonely Thanksgiving when it is just the two of you because you cannot afford to travel to your parents’ home or his, that year, and you are left trying to gamely establish a sort of tradition of your own. And you miss your childhood holidays, have a nostalgia for them, which surprises you. And then, out of nowhere, there are your own kids, and you are so busy being adequate to their needs that you scarcely notice that your traditions are busy growing up, right alongside your human offspring.

But then, one year, Thanksgiving comes again and you slow down enough somehow to notice everyone sitting around your table, your children, your parents, traveling to visit you, uncomplaining about the foldout couch bed you’ve made up for them, and normal is never even the question, nor do you spend time dwelling on how each person isn’t perfect, because you are so grateful for each person there, for the time you get to spend expressing your love for them, for the fact that they see your flaws and love you still.

Tofurkey and turkey, side-by-side then, I hope the feelings from Thanksgiving last longer than the leftovers. and I send my appreciation to everyone who keeps showing up and reading here.

* He is thirteen years and eight weeks tomorrow. Which means I ought to be getting used to this word soon, but it’s sort of like practicing saying “my husband” or writing your married name, which, actually, no wait, I didn’t change my name. But you know what I mean. It still feels new and strange.