Happy Dysfunctional Thanksgiving

Another Holiday down. And I think that any Holiday you can walk away from is a good one. I’ve always wondered where the truly functional families are. Every family event I’ve been to, mine or someone else’s, has degrees of dysfunction. Just my home sweet home seems to be a model for a new sitcom.

We visited Chicago first for some of Melissa’s family. This was Melissa’s step-Dad Bill’s family. Bill’s first family (his kids and first wife) are a little too soap-opera-esque. He’s a retired truck driver from the midwest. HIs eldest son is gay, and a complete crack-up that likes to dress up as a 6′ 5″ Roux Paul for Holloween (before he puts on his 6″ stiletto pumps in size 15 EEE). When he came out to his dad, his dad was OK with it. The whole, “he’s my son” attitude. One of Bill’s daughters is a bit more estranges, announcing that she was pregnant 3 days before she had the baby. Seems she is still bitter because after having an issue with making bad man-choices throughout her life, her mother (Bill’s first wife) had tried to suit for custody of her first child, and she took offense and is now a tad distant. Bill’s other daughter has a husband that is finally getting it back together and in a 12-step program, but there was some “color” in that past as well. But they all go their separate ways for the thanksgiving holiday, and so are not usually in the picture.

We went to visit/stay with Bill’s brothers and sisters, and their kids. The alcoholic brother was busy judging dog shows, a couple siblings have have died (and I never met), and a couple are estranged. So of the 9 siblings on that side, only about 4 show up with their kids. The older generation has a joke because they had all sons, that all have a curse of marrying some of the bitchiest/bossiest wives in all of the greater chicago area. As an outsider, I laughed that off and play quiet observer, but have to note that they are completely correct. Yup, I know I’d be divorced if my wife treated me like that — but somehow their system works for them, and the wives act as if they have one more large male child than they actually do, and their spouses put up with it. It was the usual maelstrom that simple words like chaos and anarchy can’t fully describe. We had a 3 year old’s birthday party at a Fire Station (a couple of the sons are firemen), just to add to festive atmosphere.

The highlight of the Chicago trip for my wife was when we were riding around in the fire-truck and the siren started going off. The driver looks at me, and says, “you’re setting off the siren”. I was perplexed as I hadn’t done anything, and said, “you’re shitting me, right?”, knowing that it wasn’t above firemen to mess with a newbie on a ride. His reply was “No, there’s a small button on the floor that I was standing on when I braced myself going around the last corner”. Who knew? That provided comic relief for everyone in the cab, and to whom the story was relayed to later; which I’m pretty sure includes most of the Nothern Chicago area. For me the highlight of the trip was getting my Chicago hot-dog, with the sport peppers, cucumber slices and celery salt, (no ketchup) the way God intended for hot-dogs to be eaten. A New York Coney dog isn’t bad, but a Chicago dod is manna.

Well we no sooner got back from last weekend’s early Thanksgiving trip, until we started driving for our next one. We currently live in Austin, a wonderful town by the way, but I got a 6 month+ job in Silicon Valley (San Jose) working for Adobe (I start tomorrow, and am looking forward to it). So we decided to pack my little car with as many clothes as it could carry, and one computer and a wife, and drive to Phoenix to see Melissa’s Mom’s family, and then on to Orange County to see mine.

As an aside, you never fully realize how big a State Texas is, until you drive it. The middle of the State is “hill country” with rolling hills, oak trees everywhere and lots of green, littered with small towns. Very pretty. After 6-7 hours of driving, you get to the more deserty part of Texas, which tells you that you’re half way out of the State. This is the same brown scrub scenery (dotted with cacti) that you see through all of Southern New Mexico, Arizona and California (until you get into L.A. or Orange County). So there wasn’t a lot of scenery. Melissa pointed out about every couple hours that those who think we are over-populated have never actually driven or flown across the U.S. We were in God’s country, because there sure weren’t that many human beings around.

Phoenix was a bust. Melissa’s mom is an identical twin, with another sister. The twin’s husband was in the hospital for a blocked carotid artery that they had just scraped out. But for some unknown bureaucratic reason, they’d chosen to take him to one that was a couple hours away (each way), so it was too far out of the way to visit (he was already recouping fine), but as most of the family was there, it didn’t make for a good visit. There’s a whole story about them and the Pizza franchise that they’d owned, but when the IRS and franchise company came at them (for laws/rules they’d changed and got them for retroactively), they not only lost all the Restaurants, but the family members (like Melissa’s Mom) that had helped out by cosigning were also attacked legally. It took years and re-mortgaging houses to extricate themselves from the mess. But that was years ago, and there was no real visit this time, so we were on to So Cal for my family.

Now lest you think I’m picking on her side of the family tree, just read on. We stayed with my parents and their two bulldogs. My wife is not a dog person if you have well behaved small dogs. Two 75 lbs spoiled-rotten bulldogs that lick, jump, hump, chew, beg, knock things over, and so on, is not a great place for her. My Dad seems to regularly let them in, where they run in, jump on the leather couch that they’ve trashed (chewed/scratched), then bound on to my dog-phobic wife who squeaks and tries to push them off, while my parents say “bad dog” and “down” while not actually doing anything about. So my wife and I hide upstairs in the den. My parents dogs are the kids they never had. (They were well meaning, absentee party-hound socialite yuppie parents — and now the bulldogs are getting the nurturing and spoiling that my brother and I mostly missed). We seriously chuckle because for the first year my Dad held my brothers daughter like she was nuclear waste (at arms length), and now that she’s an 18 month high energy toddler, he keeps trying to hold her like she’s an infant instead of propping her on a hip (which she may tolerate). And we have a couple picture with my Mom holding her with various expressions like terror, confusion, or distrust on her face. My parents are much better with their dogs.

My Mom has a habit of using her outdoor voice at all times, two octaves higher than it needs to be; and repeatedly mixing up my brother and my names (even calling us by one of the dogs names), and confusing the names of our respective wives. And Bill’s son’s wives have nothing on the way my Mom treats my Dad, or occasionally my brother or I (which seldom gets the desired effect). My Dad’s usual response is to either ignore her completely (while she keeps turning up her volume level), or to have a drink to smooth out the rough edges of life. But this particular Thanksgiving had him more willing than normal to stand up and argue back; which was a bit of “good for him”, mixed with, “are those two nattering nannies still going at it?”

My Mom’s brother (another Bill), and his family came. Well, most did. Their eldest son had something where both his feet had swollen to the point where he couldn’t wear shoes or walk, for over 3 weeks, but he refused to go to the doctors — and we all tried to convince them of the potential severity and ramifications if they didn’t drag his sorry ass to the doctors! My newly married other cousin was explaining how workers-comp system is. She has a torn up shoulder with a problem, but because she did it at work (she’s a Pastry Chef at the Ritz Carlton), she’s not allowed to go see her own doctor or a specialist or she loses her workers comp claim — she HAS to go to their incompetent excuses for doctors that keep telling her to stay off it, while refusing to do critical tests and instead doing physical therapy which has only made it progressively worse for 6 months. The last cousin on that side is the car nut, and is still debating on becoming a cop.

My Mom’s brother is complex. He’s a nice guy that has helped many kids abandoned by their parents, treats his kids really well, and really has a big heart and is pretty generous in many ways. On the other side, he has single handedly contributed to the road rage problem in the greater Los Angeles basin area, and is the one who taught me to drive in downtown Hollywood, by standing on my foot on the gas, while occasionally reaching over from the passenger seat and helping me swerve around slow moving objects (even if that meant going into center islands or oncoming traffic). I’m not kidding about that. Another lesson consisted of telling me if I didn’t keep up with the Mercedes racing through the hollywood hills, that I’d never drive with him again. He also is completely verbally abusive to his wife, and has been for the last 30 years. I and others have tried to talk to them individually over the years, but to no positive effect. She claims it isn’t physical and won’t do anything about it, he claims that he wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t so damn stupid, and there’s not much an outsider can do.

About every other holiday will have at least one small session with him calling his wife by her pet name (“Stupid Cunt”), which usually gets my wife’s hackles up so much that I have to get her out of the house before she starts trying to bludgeon him to death with a drumstick (and she’s a mild-mannered vegetarian). On this holiday I heard him yelling at her in the kitchen (about something as serious as overfilling the gravy that they were taking home, and making a mess), and I distinctively heard a smack. I was in the family room talking with their youngest son (the gun and car nut — so we had a lot of common interests), and we both looked over. But it was a distance away, and over. She was sobbing, and we offered support. And I’d asked the son if that was normal, and he said “No”. It isn’t that you don’t take it seriously, but what can you do? I tried to talk to others about it later, but my Grandma flat out denies it. And when I talked to my Mom her responses where, “You didn’t actually see it? He might have slapped her arm, right?” (As if that’s a lot better). And she brushed it off with, “Well his doctors only give him 3-5 years to live because of his heart condition”. Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

My Brother (Devon) is very religious and just refuses to deal with Bill at all, saying that he’s a bad influence, so they are usually on opposite ends of the house at any given time. And while I get his point, and do think he and religion has had a positive influence, I’m of the type that thinks “you pick your friends, you pick your enemies, but you can’t pick your relatives”. The irony is that while Bill and my Mom seem to have some anger/control issue, our generation (my brother and I, and Bill’s kids), all seem pretty normal. It seems to have skipped a generation, or so we hope.

I was amused that we all loaded our plates on the kitchen table, and as we had two tables in the dining room and living room, table-1 was already stuffing their faces when my brother came in and reminded us all that we should say, “grace”. We do this every year, so it shouldn’t have come as a shock. But as we don’t normally do this normally at home, it seems to catch a few of us each year, but this year was especially comical with all the guilty looks and entire table of people caught amid shoveling. The expressions were priceless, and I nearly choked on my mashed potatoes.

We missed Roger. Roger is a second cousin (“Uncle”), that was a gay communist / eco-extremists that used to spend Holidays with us. I spent 3 weeks backpacking around the Sierra’s with him, until I cracked my head open and had to be flown out by helicopter. But being that he was a gay communist / eco-extremist it always made for lively conversations when my ultra-conservative right-wing Grandfather was alive. The political debates covered a wide gambit of topics, and usually ended with my Grandfather offering to buy Roger a one-way-ticket to the “Soviet Fucking Union” any time Roger wanted. And for many years, he’d bring over his life partner who Mr. Slave in South Park was modeled after. The first time Paul came to Thanksgiving dinner wearing some leather studded lederhosen bondage thing was absolutely priceless. (Seriously, I’m not kidding). It was two more years before we think Grandma finally admitted that Roger might be some of those homosexuals she’d been hearing about. But Paul and Roger broke up, and Roger is now living in the mountains somewhere, so we don’t see him very often. Roger is a neat guy, but knowing his political views, I do secretly harbor a little trepidation that the next Ted Kaczynski story might hit a little too close to home.

We also had over a friend of the family, Gunther (the mad german) and his wife Kay. Not mad as in angry, mad as insanely fearless. He rode a Jet-Ski to Catalina Island (over 20 miles). He used to jump off the roof of his house into the pool (clearing like 10′ of forgiving cement sidewalk). My dad and him used to race their Aston Martin’s around greater Los Angeles; Gunther got one after my Dad. My Dad got one because Uncle Bill used to import cars from Europe and gave it to him for a song, and my Dad liked the James Bond mystique combined with the fact that his insurance company thought he’d said “Austin Healy” and so had quoted him an affordable rate. We were reminiscing, and I’ve known him for 37 years; longer than I’ve known my brother, and since he was 28 years old, but is now retired. That kind of punches me in the gut with reality — I’d known him since he was 28 years old — 14 years younger than I am now! He’s retired! I’m middle aged. Gads it goes by quick!

Gunther has a family as well. He is divorced from his first wife and has two sons. His oldest son (the one I hung out with growing up), is gay. You’d think that a first generation German immigrant would have a problem with that, but it was Gunther and Kay that came out to their son, and asked him if he was gay, and explained that they’d love him either way. And it was the Mom and his brother (both religious but a tad fanatical about it) that both gave him problems. Because the youngest brother refused to allow his older brother to come to his wedding, and because of some other things involved, Gunther and his youngest son are estranged (written out of the will, etc.). Seems Gunther could accept a gay son far more readily than he could accept a bigoted son that turned his back on his family. I can respect that. But as his eldest lives far away, and his youngest isn’t family any more, they usually spend holidays with us.

We also visited with my other cousin Kevin. He’s a gay psychologist (being both gay and dealing with many gay issues/clients), and while he’s technically my second cousin (my Mom and his Mom are cousins) as they lived close and my mom and his were always close, so were we. He lives up in San Fran, so it’ll be nice to be able to visit and maybe even have an in-town place to crash occasionally. My wife and I were also talking about doing an Italy tour in a year or so with him, he runs those on the side as a hobby and he speaks fluent Italian, so that will be very nice.

It seems like just yesterday (or a couple days before) we were visiting an elephant seal colony and trying to talk over the clamor, or was that Thanksgiving dinner? Because that wasn’t enough chaos, my Mom had insisted we all go shopping for black Friday, hitting the stores as early as 5:00 am, and I didn’t get home until 7:00 that night. We’ve obviously been in a cultural wasteland, because coming back to Southern California we found totally new “fashions” like Ugg boots at hot-pants? Fur lined things, and so on that would get you openly laughed at in the parts of the country I’ve been living in. I spent all day fighting crowds so that I could get $20 off some shoes and digital frame.

After the familial visits, my wife went to the airport and flew home to Austin, and I got in the car and drove to San Jose. I’m now living in an Extended Stay with intermittent internet access, and am going to have to look for something a little more permanent and reliable in the next few weeks. Things are peaceful and lonely, and I’m OK with that. My wife and I will fly back and forth for visits for the next few months, and see how things shake out. But I think we’re pretty happy with our lives — our long periods of peace and home and stability, broken up by the brief periods of frenetic travel, insanity and abject chaos. But I really wonder if there are normal families out there? Or more accurately, that I think we have a normal family. Sure the actual issues change, but every family has issues along with a smattering of weirdo’s, loons, angry people, fights, chaos, isolated soloists, substance abusers and so on. I sometimes look at TV shows and think, “that’s like life… except with better writers, and they’re toning down the personalities too much”. At least we’re between seasons…. er, until Christmas anyway.