The Family

I'm enjoying a lovely Venetian pinot grigio (with soda) tonight.

I thought some family background might be useful (for whatever).

My immediate family consisted of the parents and my two younger siblings. Five altogether.

I seldom saw my father’s parents or sisters while I was growing up, and they seldom showed any interest in me (the one period of time when they did express interest in seeing me was during my parents’ separation: they would have me over and pump me for dirt on my mom. Since the divorce was finalized, I saw them once before their deaths ten years ago). So when I speak of “my family,” I mean “my mother’s family.” My immediate family falls under that umbrella.

My mother’s family believed themselves to be very “traditional.” Most of the men served in the military at some point. Beyond the military, the men worked as mechanics, factory workers, miners. My own father worked at a car plant and later as a miner (until his drunkenness and adultery destroyed his job and marriage). The women stayed at home with children and housework. Nothing more was expected or desired of them. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the females were weaklings: smart, strong broads run in the family’s blood. We knew how to talk back. We also knew when not to talk back.

You could say we were “working poor”; we were definitely working class with that reverse elitism you sometimes find among poor people: folks who didn’t work with their hands were suspect, and this included teachers, clergymen, and the rich. Too much time sitting, thinking, or praying equaled laziness, and laziness was corrupt. Too much thinking couldn’t be good for a person, anyway. No. In my family all was black and white, either / or. I don’t mean to imply that my relations were all dimwits or non-thinkers. They were, however, anti-intellectual. I was the first person in my family’s history to go to university, but I think this has a lot to do with the opportunities for education that arose while I was growing up rather than anything else. Academia wasn’t a future they mapped out for me, that’s for sure.

The family was never “close,” as in intimate, open, honest, and loving. But we did stay together. Tribalism, really. Nearly every time a member of the family moved, the entire family--uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins--moved (this actually made for some great road trips).

Emotionally, we are all expected to behave a certain way: not like a sissy. We--both men and women--were expected to take whatever came our way, and to take anything other than a macho stance meant you were a baby, a weakling. Because of this, or enabling it perhaps, there was always lots of “mean teasing” going on. People would hurl insults at each other and pass it off as “kidding around.” Men would call each other pussies, women would sneer at other women about their appearance, name-calling was par for the course: “lardass,” “pussy” “sissy,” “cow” “fatty” were common nicknames for family members. Nice, huh? But maybe it’s not uncommon. I don’t know. I always resisted acting this stuff out; I hated being around it, and I always feared being the object of somebody’s else’s scorn.

Oh, and my grandpa would call his sons by female names, and this just resulted in the men over-hyping their masculinity. This often came to a head when they were drinking (which was often: whiskey and Coors beer were the family’s preferred bevvies). When the menfolk were drunk, fights would break out. Lots of shouting that lead to lots of hitting. Brawling, really, because everyone would get involved. I didn’t see much of the fighting, but I heard it. Sometimes from two houses away. Sometimes the fights--the yelling and the hitting--involved husbands and wives.

Moreover, the family was heavily sexualized. Little girls were encouraged to play cute and flirt, to pout, to be submissive, to simper, to try on Mae West impressions, to dance to “The Stripper” (no worries: they remained fully clothes!). The big message: to be loved by this group, you had to be appealing and you had to obey whatever an adult directive given by an adult.
I remember one Christmas where the kids (including me) were hustled out to an uncle’s house so the adults could watch a vhs tape of Debbie Does Dallas. Could you imagine watching a hardcore porn film with your brothers, sisters, and parents in the same room? But for us, or them, I should say, I guess it was normal. Magazines like Playboy, Oui, and, now and then, Hustler were scattered around homes. Two boxes of an old sex-themed comic book called Sex to Sexty got passed around from home to home. By the time I was five I knew exactly what my body was supposed to look like: big (but perky) breasted, long limbed, flat bellied, and thin waisted. I seriously thought my body would grow and develop to resemble that of a 1970s centerfold. People bitch about Barbie's ill effects on girls. Sod that. Barbie's plastic. Photographs are real. Realer than Barbie, at any rate (at least they were in the 70s).

In the family, men and women alike would talk about women’s bodies--their breasts, bottoms, and weight. When I was developing, relatives seemed more interested in my bustline than I was. If you reacted to these comments, you were sneered at because you couldn’t “take it” (back to the macho stance). One small example: as a teen, I got a phone call from my drunken dad. He asked me how big my tits were (yes, he called tham tits). When I told him that wasn’t appropriate thing for a father to ask his daughter, he said “well, excuse me. I thought you were mature enough for this kind of talk.” Eh?

Now none of this is, I believe, abusive. My family were heavily invested in sex, but being heavily invested in sex doesn’t automatically make one a predator or an abuser. What I am trying to point out is the lack of boundaries. My family didn’t do a good job of distinguishing public matters from private ones. Also significant, think, is the way the entire family objectified women as physical things. Your grades don’t matter but your bra size does. A career isn’t anything if you’re unattractive. The only good woman is a submissive and sexually appealing one (I’ll write more on the effects of this perspective in another post. Hah. Make that all my other posts).

My grandma rebelled: she gained weight (and was called “lardass” the rest of her life). My grandma died when she was 59. She was ill, but she resisted medical treatment. She wanted out I think. And I resent that--not her wanting out, but the conditions that made her want out (does that make sense?).

So writing this out, I see a number of things that provided a schema for my own life behavior, for it involves:
Alcohol abuse
Lack of boundaries (or, now, uncertainty of boundaries)
Fear of the sneer

And the things that are valued in a female:
Obedience
Sexual passivity / availability
Physical / sexual appeal
Stoicism (e.g., macho stance)

Much of my family is dead now. Two uncles (one a suicide, the other a drug overdose). Grandpa died in his 70s and Grandma, of course, at 59. Once Grandma died, everything pretty much fragmented anyway. The tribalism collapsed into petty arguments and jealousies. People stopped communicating. Everyone moved on to different towns. Any pretense at being a traditional family faded as we isolated ourselves into smaller units, which, in turn, also shattered.

Note: If there's one thing I can't let go of, it's losing my Grandma. She was my anchor, my admirer, my encourager; of my family, she's the only one who supported me, who never derided me, and who (even though she desperately wanted me to give her grandbabies) told me I would go to college. If someone else had a go at me in her presence, she would take them apart. But I'm convinced that she just wanted to go. She was tired.