3 posts tagged “family”
My family has a weird thing with ketchup. We put it on everything. My grandfather ate pretzels dipped in ketchup. When I was little my mom would boil macaroni noodles and we would smother them in ketchup (this is fondly referred to as sketti & ketchup in my family, and it is still my favorite snack to this day. However, I've pretty much stopped making it, because when I do, Kelly makes disgusted faces and gags a little.). We even have special ketchup recipes, such as my great-grandmother's Ketchup Raisin Cookies. (You can gag if you want, but they are good.)
So I guess I didn't really realize that this was weird until I started living with other people besides my family and realized that most people don't even care if they have it in the house. So I've tried to take my ketchup use down a notch or two, because I wanted to have a more sophisticated taste in food.
And why am I thinking about this? I just spent a whole bunch of time making a delicious eggplant parmesan, and then I pulled the good old ketchup bottle out of the fridge and smothered the eggplant in it. And just for a moment, I caught myself feeling uncouth and embarassed of my redneck palate. But then I dove in and tasted the dish in all of its tomatoey, eggplanty glory, and a certain familiar happiness replaced the shame. Mmm, ketchup, it is almost unnatural how much I love you.
So now that it's been established that my family is quite crazy, and somewhat depressing, I'd like to make an addendum to my post about the negative side of my family. Somehow, most of us have managed to marry up, to bring a person into our lives that improves how we live our lives and who we are as people. Many of us have found that elusive person to love and who loves us back that is willing to take on a crazy family as their own. I don't know how we have continually found these wonderful people, but I do know that I am so grateful for them.
My Great Aunt Shirley has changed my Great Uncle Art from a stoic, seemlingly characterless man into a lovely old guy full of charm and humor. My Uncle Paul's second try at marriage turned up a sweet and patient Frenchwoman, Mary-Vaughn. My sister-in-law Lisa is a sensitive and entertaining person who genuinely laughs at all of our jokes, even the ones that aren't that funny. And the list goes on and on from there of people who we are lucky to have picked up along the way.
And then there is Kelly. Everyone in my family loves her right down to her bones. Sometimes I think they would trade me in for her if they could. Even my mom, who once disowned me for being gay, has a deep, deep attachment to her. And here is the best part: she loves me too. She has hung in there with me long enough to polish me up, to change some of my values for the better, to make me into a better version of myself. I have also managed to marry up.
Amongst all the thoughts of how crazy we are, of all the negative things that we have in our history, it gives me hope for our family. It balances the negative with some positive, and it makes me feel like things aren't that bad. Maybe they're even pretty darn good.
I visited my parents in Pennsylvania last weekend, and it was, as always, a thought-provoking trip. I took the above picture while I was there, almost by accident, and I didn't expect it to come out like this. But somehow, I managed to pretty much capture a moment where they were stripped down to their essences, and even though it's not a pretty photograph, I love it because it feels raw and real to me.
Everyone in my family smiles a lot, and we all have a pretty good sense of humor. We are, for the most part, all intelligent, kind, and thoughtful people. But when you strip all that away, what is left is what this picture reminds me of. My dad, the disciplinarian workaholic, in uniform and checking his watch; my mom, the manic depressive housewife, dark and shadowy in the foreground. I come from a long line of alcoholics, gamblers, workaholics, stubborn bastards, gluttons, and chronically depressed women. We are emotion suppressors, bad communicators, and I think we all have some pretty serious skeletons in our closets. My uncle got drunk and burned down his parents' house with a wayward cigarette. My grandmother, who committed suicide, was completely batsh*t crazy and abused my mom for years. I rarely remember seeing my dad as I was growing up, as he was always working, whether at home or actual job; when he was home, much of my memories include feeling completely terrified of him as he disciplined us. I have some very weird memories that I still haven't completely processed of having to be the parent to my mom when she was in some of her many depressed periods.
We never talk about these things, and yet they are always there, looming in the background, waiting for the smiles to fade and the laughter to pause long enough for someone to take a picture of the things the way they are, of imperfect people just being imperfect. I don't blame anyone for these imperfections, for my family as we are. Just as I love that picture, I love us as we are. If nothing else, it reminds me that we are survivors, we are forgivers, we are just-get-on-with-it-ers. We are still here, and we still love each other very much. And this gives me another reason to smile, another reason to laugh.
