i spent quite a bit of the weekend thinking about families. five hours to my grandmother's house (and back) gets a girl thinkin' about a lot of things because there's really not much else to do. when we got to gloomy round lake centre, which is really quite a shame because it's gorgeous in the sunlight and summertime, i felt as if nothing had changed when really it had. i remember being there for the last time at age thirteen and the very last time i stayed for the entire summer i was ten. i am now a full-on adult (there has been some discussion about the validity of that statement but the age makes it true) and i have never experienced the ominous "up north" visit as an adult. we drove past houses i'd been in before, rhyming off the inhabitants as if i had walked through each and every doorway the day before and we turned into my grandmother's driveway, i suddenly felt very nervous to see her. i don't know why but i did. but when that small frame of a woman, mean and commanding in her time, opened the door to me and started to cry, i knew i was fine.
see, families are always about perception. for the first thirteen years of my life i had felt very normally connected to most of my family up in the boons but for the past seven years there has been a very real disconnect and unfamiliarity with that territory. i really only have my mom and my sister to call true family with the occasional appearance of my uncle from peterborough who lives a somewhat normal life with his wife and kids. for the first thirteen years of my constant appearance in my immediate, i guess somewhat extended too since i am related to EVERYONE in round lake, family's life, i had the same view of a comfortable, homey kind of existence that i thought was completely normal. when i grew up--the not-so advantageous aspects of an adult-- i learned about the seedy, underhanded and petty ways of my family and i began to really dislike most of them (read: my crazy aunt sam and her matriarchal aspirations). luckily enough for my mom and i we didn't see anyone this weekend except my gran and my great-grandparents who definitely did not recognize us in the minute we stayed in their "old folks home". there we no fake pleasantries exchanged to keep up appearances and no one came to visit. i guess seven years away really did matter and they were pissed, for whatever truly stupid reason.
my mom spent the entire drive home--after she had literally bum rushed me out the door of my room to get ready and leave--talking about all the things that her family did to her and how she hates a group of people so much for not accepting her the way she is. this is true. the entire town is socially backward, stuck in an ideal of society that hasn't existed for years and it perpetuates this still, which is mind-fuckingly awful. patriarchs rule with an iron fist, closely manipulated by their wives, and are always under the guise of catholic faith and the good it does. it clearly does not do any good whatsoever because everyone in that town is fucked three ways from sunday and will have problems the rest of their lives (if they choose to admit it and see it). the entire visit with my grandma felt like a hillbilly version of gilmore girls where i felt the need to please my gran and my mom was really standoffish and when i wasn't in the room my gran wanted to lecture my mom about how she lived her life. add in an abundance of food, guilt and manipulation and there you have my comparison! and as she talked about the fifty years of pain she's been carrying around, i really felt what it was like to be an adult in that place and how awful it is especially as a girl. if i had seen more of my relatives, like my cankerous uncle gerard or crazy aunt sam or possibly adulterous pot-head uncle vernie, then maybe i would have gotten the full effect of their hate due to lack of understanding or just because of how they were raised.
i never really appreciated until now the effect your family has on you long after you say goodbye to them. my mom will always have issues with them, especially my grandma and my very dead grandpa, like i will always have issues with my dad. fun fact: they are from the same town so i was hoping when we drove by my other grandparents house they would be outside so i could yell obscenities about how they royally fucked up not only his life but mine and my sister's as catharsis. they would then pray for their souls against the crassness of their granddaughter being the anti-christ who mingles with jews, the left-side of the political spectrum and likes those communist dictators and their funny moustaches.
at least some deliciously "youthful" qualities of mine will never go away.
