I have not had much chance to write lately due to being swamped at work. But I just finished writing a big report, so I thought I’d reward myself by venting all the bitterness ‘n bile that’s been building up in my system over the last few difficult weeks. …One of the reasons I have time to write now is that today is my office's Christmas party, and rather than celebrate a holiday I hate with people I despise, I’d rather sit at my terminal at work and cleanse my soul. It’s a funny bit of business these Christmas parties. Nobody likes one another, and nobody really wants to be there, and yet we do this shit year after year. Why not just give us the day off, or at least send us home early? I don’t get it. It reminds me of what I’ve just had to endure during a week back in New York visiting with my family. It was a rocky time for me emotionally. I stayed with my parents, which is what I usually do when I go back East for visits, but it’s gotten increasingly difficult. I’ve really started to feel like I get in the way of their way of life when I’m cooped up in their cramped apartment. Over time, there’s been a kind of just-below-the-surface emotional distancing between me and my parents. They would of course be appalled to hear me say this, but only because a sober analysis of the situation – as opposed to denial and wish fulfillment – would reveal that what I’m saying is true. There’s always been distance, I think, always been an unpleasant sense on my part that they don’t really ‘get me’, don’t understand that I’m not motivated by the same things they’re motivated by, but I’ve only recently come to realize that this is perhaps not a ‘me problem.’ Don’t get me wrong, though. I have plenty of me problems, and I’m willing to accept some of the responsibility for not having a particularly nurturing relationship with my mom and dad. It’s complicated and not the kind of thing I can pick apart and explain in detail now, writing at my terminal while all the pathetic stooges I work with sit in some miserable cheap Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, pretending to like each other, and wishing they could order a few $5 margaritas to dull the painfulness and boredom. It's not like the good old days when guys 'n gals would get freaky at office parties and dance with lamp shades on their heads. Drinking during office hours is strictly verboten, at least in the public sector.
...If I sound a bit out of sorts, I suppose it’s because I haven’t been able to lose the toxic fumes swirling around me in the wake of the Thanksgiving trip. Thanksgiving day was really bad. I was there, seated at the table, along with my sister and my sister's husband. We all love each other and are mutually supportive. I'm lucky to have them there. But then there’s my mom, who wears a face in a jar that she keeps by the door. She's emotionally stunted and deals with her anxiety with an eating disorder and by remaining disingenuously upbeat about everything, even in the face of the seething hostility of my older sister, who is my father’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her adopted daughter. And then there’s my dad’s older son, who's practically deaf and, so the parental line goes, dropped so much acid in the 60s that he’s just sort of spaced out. He doesn’t participate in the (stunted) conversations at the festive dinner table, but I think this has less to do with drugs and more to do with a personal choice. Can't say I balme him.
His second wife is at the table with him. She’s from China and speaks very limited English, but has nevertheless gained a heavy New York accent for the words that she can speak. In itself, these minor details about her would not be all that significant, at least not until I told you that he’s 65…and she’s 25, two years older than his daughter, my niece, who is at the table, too. If all this sounds extremely fucked, that’s because it is. My niece recently graduated from Princeton but decided to marry some dude well below her station, whom no one else in my family likes...because he’s well below her station. How soon those who’ve advanced from the lower middle classes forget where they came from! My niece and her hubby got married about a year after she graduated from high school, so she did not have a typically Princeton-ish experience at Princeton. She made no friends, absorbed very little either intellectually or socially, and basically could have had the same experience at any state or even community college, and it would have been cheaper and less fraught with all the crushing expectations that come with graduating from a place as stuffy and status conscious as Princeton. My parents are furious with her husband for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is that he supposedly “ruined her life” by taking her out of the whole Princeton vibe. What makes it worse is that, now that she’s an ivy-league graduate - but, in a sense, not really an ivy-league graduate - she has no real plans to be a doctor, a lawyer, a
professor, an investment banker, etc. Instead, she’s basically the administrative manager in her father’s store, a job that, truth be told, does not require more than a high school diploma. Ever seen
Five Easy Pieces? …And finally, my dad is seated at the head of the table, grouchy and bossy as hell, and looking for any little thing to be aggrieved about. These days you’ve gotta walk on egg shells around him. His temper will rip the fucking face right off your skull. I love the guy so much, but my love is put to the test if I’m around him for too long at once. Funny thing is, I think the same goes for him with me. Call it a push. …So try to imagine, if you will, what the feeling is like at that Thanksgiving dinner table. Sounds really loving and warm and happy, doesn't it? And then afterwards, when everybody’s left with a belly full of food and a head locked in a vice-like grip of stress, my parents sit together and go through a detailed post-mortem, ruthlessly picking apart every flaw in every person who, only a half hour earlier, was seated at their table. My older sister is described as “angry and shallow”; her daughter “has no intellectual curiosity about anything”; my older brother is “out of it”; his daughter is “a total failure in life”; her husband is a “fucking asshole.” There's so much negativity swirling around this conversation that it's even too much for me, and I usually thrive on negativity. My parents know better than to say anything too pointed about my sister or her husband when I’m in the room, which is good. But, in the words of Robert Plant, it makes me wonder: What exactly do they say about me when I’m not there?
I have not had much chance to write lately due to being swamped at work. But I just finished writing a big report, so I thought I’d reward myself by venting all the bitterness ‘n bile that’s been building up in my system over the last few difficult weeks. …One of the reasons I have time to write now is that today is my office's Christmas party, and rather than celebrate a holiday I hate with people I despise, I’d rather sit at my terminal at work and cleanse my soul. It’s a funny bit of business these Christmas parties. Nobody likes one another, and nobody really wants to be there, and yet we do this shit year after year. Why not just give us the day off, or at least send us home early? I don’t get it. It reminds me of what I’ve just had to endure during a week back in New York visiting with my family. It was a rocky time for me emotionally. I stayed with my parents, which is what I usually do when I go back East for visits, but it’s gotten increasingly difficult. I’ve really started to feel like I get in the way of their way of life when I’m cooped up in their cramped apartment. Over time, there’s been a kind of just-below-the-surface emotional distancing between me and my parents. They would of course be appalled to hear me say this, but only because a sober analysis of the situation – as opposed to denial and wish fulfillment – would reveal that what I’m saying is true. There’s always been distance, I think, always been an unpleasant sense on my part that they don’t really ‘get me’, don’t understand that I’m not motivated by the same things they’re motivated by, but I’ve only recently come to realize that this is perhaps not a ‘me problem.’ Don’t get me wrong, though. I have plenty of me problems, and I’m willing to accept some of the responsibility for not having a particularly nurturing relationship with my mom and dad. It’s complicated and not the kind of thing I can pick apart and explain in detail now, writing at my terminal while all the pathetic stooges I work with sit in some miserable cheap Mexican restaurant in Echo Park, pretending to like each other, and wishing they could order a few $5 margaritas to dull the painfulness and boredom. It's not like the good old days when guys 'n gals would get freaky at office parties and dance with lamp shades on their heads. Drinking during office hours is strictly verboten, at least in the public sector.
His second wife is at the table with him. She’s from China and speaks very limited English, but has nevertheless gained a heavy New York accent for the words that she can speak. In itself, these minor details about her would not be all that significant, at least not until I told you that he’s 65…and she’s 25, two years older than his daughter, my niece, who is at the table, too. If all this sounds extremely fucked, that’s because it is. My niece recently graduated from Princeton but decided to marry some dude well below her station, whom no one else in my family likes...because he’s well below her station. How soon those who’ve advanced from the lower middle classes forget where they came from! My niece and her hubby got married about a year after she graduated from high school, so she did not have a typically Princeton-ish experience at Princeton. She made no friends, absorbed very little either intellectually or socially, and basically could have had the same experience at any state or even community college, and it would have been cheaper and less fraught with all the crushing expectations that come with graduating from a place as stuffy and status conscious as Princeton. My parents are furious with her husband for a long list of reasons, not the least of which is that he supposedly “ruined her life” by taking her out of the whole Princeton vibe. What makes it worse is that, now that she’s an ivy-league graduate - but, in a sense, not really an ivy-league graduate - she has no real plans to be a doctor, a lawyer, a 
professor, an investment banker, etc. Instead, she’s basically the administrative manager in her father’s store, a job that, truth be told, does not require more than a high school diploma. Ever seen Five Easy Pieces? …And finally, my dad is seated at the head of the table, grouchy and bossy as hell, and looking for any little thing to be aggrieved about. These days you’ve gotta walk on egg shells around him. His temper will rip the fucking face right off your skull. I love the guy so much, but my love is put to the test if I’m around him for too long at once. Funny thing is, I think the same goes for him with me. Call it a push. …So try to imagine, if you will, what the feeling is like at that Thanksgiving dinner table. Sounds really loving and warm and happy, doesn't it? And then afterwards, when everybody’s left with a belly full of food and a head locked in a vice-like grip of stress, my parents sit together and go through a detailed post-mortem, ruthlessly picking apart every flaw in every person who, only a half hour earlier, was seated at their table. My older sister is described as “angry and shallow”; her daughter “has no intellectual curiosity about anything”; my older brother is “out of it”; his daughter is “a total failure in life”; her husband is a “fucking asshole.” There's so much negativity swirling around this conversation that it's even too much for me, and I usually thrive on negativity. My parents know better than to say anything too pointed about my sister or her husband when I’m in the room, which is good. But, in the words of Robert Plant, it makes me wonder: What exactly do they say about me when I’m not there?
No comments:
Post a Comment