Family is a funhouse.<\/p>\n
You get off the plane or train as the person you know yourself to be: intelligent, competent, even accomplished and, above all, adult.<\/p>\n
You walk into your parents\u2019 house and you see, immediately, right there in the kitchen window, a shorter, wider or bow-legged or knock-kneed or acne-covered kid with your eyes and a bad attitude.<\/p>\n
Your sister reaches for a banana.<\/p>\n
You hear yourself snarl, \u201cI wanted that.\u201d And you don\u2019t even like bananas.<\/p>\n
You get a grip and offer to make coffee for everyone. You spill coffee grounds all over the floor. Your older brother laughs and there you are, a thirty-five year old\u00a0 executive,\u00a0 to whom forty people report every day, and you\u2019re hiding in the bathroom to cry.<\/p>\n
My brother-in-law recently\u00a0 beat his older brother , my husband, in ping-pong. He crowed about that game for a week. My husband maintained an unflappable and infuriating older-brother attitude about the whole thing. Their combined age is 107.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a wonder anyone goes home— and not everyone does.<\/p>\n
For some people, it\u2019s not just the powerful pull of the past that gets them worked up\u2014it\u2019s their family\u2019s unwillingness to see them as adults. I have seen pediatricians patted on the head and told to let Dad handle little Jimmy\u2019s kitchen accident and seen lawyers ignored as Uncle Archie boldly rewrites the Constitution\u00a0 in a family argument. For some families, the role you played as a child was more important than you realized\u2026to others. For your mother, you may have been her cuddly comfort during bad times; she may not tolerate a reasonable adult who doesn\u2019t end every disagreement with a snuggle on the couch and a pint of ice cream. For your father, you may have been the rebellious teen (like himself) that he still wants to tussle with.\u00a0 And for your siblings\u2014you were probably a number of people (best pal, worst rival, tattletale, punching bag, baby doll, measuring stick) and if they themselves have trouble moving on, they\u2019re not going to let you stroll into adulthood, without making a major effort to pull you back.\u00a0 The crybaby is tougher, the bully is gentler, the princess works like a dog , and the man who slaved over his Chevy\u00a0 and his lawn tractor, now rides a bicycle everywhere and chides you for not being green enough\u2014the other trick of the funhouse is managing to seeing others as they are now.<\/p>\n
But, because life itself is pretty funny–no sooner have you learned to keep your head high and your ego intact,\u00a0 walking around the edge of\u00a0 the pit of regression, the\u00a0 funhouse mirrors flip over and instead of becoming your\u00a0 past, you become your future.<\/p>\n
I swallow my deep annoyance at my mother for pushing my bangs off my forehead (\u201cYour beautiful face,\u201d she always said. She also said, less endearingly, \u201cAre you wearing your hair that way?\u201d — a question only a meta-existential philosopher or a mother could ask.))\u00a0 because, after all,\u00a0 she\u2019s an old, fond lady and even if the ritual of fixing my hair does suggest that I don\u2019t wear my hair attractively, it\u2019s not the end of the world, she means well, I know I look good, blah blah. I talk myself down and then, as if my hands have a life of their own, I find myself pushing my daughter\u2019s bangs forward, to make her haircut more pleasing to me. She understands perfectly well what I\u2019m doing and she is, understandably, offended. I lie and say that I wasn\u2019t really altering her hairstyle. (Really? What other explanation is there? Fixing her halo?). She takes pity on me, forgiving me while readjusting her hair.<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s blunt assessments and my mother\u2019s ,loving worry now pop out of my mouths like\u00a0 little toads of\u00a0 yesteryear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Family is a funhouse. You get off the plane or train as the person you know yourself to be: intelligent, competent, even accomplished and, above all, adult. You walk into your parents\u2019 house and you see, immediately, right there in the kitchen window, a shorter, wider or bow-legged or knock-kneed or acne-covered kid with your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":26,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/204\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amybloom.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}