There is a self-satisfaction, a sort of conceit that unintentionally creeps up on those of us whose family lives have been a calm and loving sanctuary all our lives. Although a norm in our minds, we quickly grow to realize that sitting beside us in class are those children who have two sets of parents or who live with their grandparents because their parents bailed years earlier or whose parents yell, scream and practically murder one another on a daily basis "for the kids." Most people, I tend to think, fall somewhere midway along the spectrum of euphoric and chaotic family lifestyles and as a young child every nuance and variation of crazy are duly noted.
At the age of 9, my cousin Mark observed at our family Christmas dinner amidst all our family and friends, "You know, mom," he said to my Aunt Rhonda as he poked at the mashed potato fort he had constructed, "you scream at dad a lot less when other people are around." My Uncle Patrick, Mark's father, bolted in from the other room where he had been scolding Tyler, Mark's older brother, for having sent our Grandpa Murray careening down the hallway on his skateboard moments earlier. "Mark! Get out here...NOW!" his father yelled. My Aunt Rhonda laughed that awkward, guarded laugh that comes out when your imperfections - in this case her husband and offspring - are sprawled out for all to see. Mark looked up at his father confused and indignant. "But Daaad," he whined, "but I didn't DO anything!" Apparently he had. "Just get in here right now," his father commanded. Then, in one last attempt to bring home his point and martyrdom, Mark raised his arms in defeat over his head and proclaimed to the entire dinner table, "Now do you see what I have to deal with??" Everyone laughed under their breath and amazement. Everyone, but Aunt Rhonda and Uncle Patrick.
Now, Mark was a handful and had been since birth, so his holiday outburst wasn't too surprising an incident. What his outburst had revealed to me, though, was that my family wasn't perfect. At 13, I thought I was the Grand Pooba of our clan of cousins only out-aged by my delinquent cousin, Tyler who set about destroying everything in his path and never, to my utter shock and disapproval, bringing home a grad above a C+. Apparently, mediocrity and decimation of property were his goals in life and I hated him for bringing down the family GPA. I was positive my concurrent acceptances to both Columbia School for Journalism and Cornell Medical Schools would frown upon my relation to a C-average student. I swore they did a background check on every family member and traceable ancestor to determine your acceptance. With that in mind, I searched inconclusively for years for ways to detach myself from this bad apple. One day, my prayers were answered.
I came home from school one day to a driveway filled with minivans and SUVs of every make, model and year created in the past decade. The Aunts had arrived. It was February, so I trucked through the snow that had happily warranted an early dismissal for all area schools. The caravan of cars in my driveway wasn't such an alarming sight. I had always assumed my mother held elegant, gossip-worthy brunches with her sisters and friends while we were away at school. What else could she possibly be up to?
As I reached the sidewalk in from of my yard and began to hear the faint chirping of my aunts inside, a raspy familiar voice called my name from the street corner. "Molly, Molly, Fo Folly!" Uh. I turned and there he was. The red-headed nuisance, my cousin Mark. "Mark, what are you doing here?" I whined in that 13-year-old, PMSy girlish whine I was picking up at school. "School let out early!" he gleefully announced as he heaped a pile of snow in his hot pink, numbed hands.
"Yeah, so why didn't you just go home?" I pried.
"Cuz, only Tyler's there."
"Oh, yeah, your dad's still at work," I was relieved neither my Aunt or Uncle trusted Mark to Tyler's care. The kid was annoying, but he didn't deserve to be accidentally decapitated by one of Tyler's in-home skateboarding stunts.
"No," he said matter-of-factly,"he moved out."
"Oh, he went on a business trip?" I corrected him.
"No, stupid, that's not what I said!"
"Don't call me stupid," I yelled.
"Well, don't ask stupid questions, then!" he retorted.
"Whatever," I said marching up the lawn to my front door. My curiosity quickly stopped me. "So, your dad moved out. Where did he go?"
"He moved in with my Uncle Henry in the city. Mom said if he didn't go she'd kill him and he said he'd rather be dead than live with her."
"Oh." I was in shock. My world was spinning. No wonder the Ya-Ya Sisterhood had converged at my house. "He said that? I mean, she said that, too?" I asked as I looked forlornly at the house on fire with chatter and blinking lights beyond the snowfall.
WHAM! A snowball to the back of the head.
"You little prick!" I screamed as I lurched toward my cousin across the front yard.
The scene inside was gruesome. My Aunt Rhonda paced our dining room into our living room and back again cursing in words I had only heard in movies. She cried and clenched her fists as she painstakingly described argument after argument after argument to my mother and her other four sisters. Mark had had his fill of eavesdropping about five minutes into our arrival and was scouring through my brother's comic book collection. Ryan would be furious and no doubt blame me for the mess, but at this moment all I could do was gawk wide-eyed through the second floor banister and soak up every last word from my aunt's lips. If eavesdropping had been a class, I would have excelled. On most occasions I justified my snooping as preparation for my journalistic career, but that afternoon I was a bona-fide voyeur and I was ok with any consequences.
"He's an incompetent bastard who has wasted the last 19 years of my life!" she yelled in a desperate, seething voice that verged on what I can now identify as heartache. She stopped in the middle of our foyer, her eyes glazed over in dismay and fury and tears, then crouched to her knees and began to sob. It didn't seem real. I felt as though I was watching one of those Lifetime movies my mom refused to let me watch for fear of my impressionable young mind. I wanted to console my aunt, but I was embarrassed. For starters, I was specifically told to get in my room, do my homework, turn the radio up and distract Mark until we were called down for dinner. Second of all, I was embarrassed. Selfishly, I somehow saw this disintegration of my family as a strain on my personal being, my personal history forevermore. I know of divorced people and my mom even had a divorced friend named Emily (categorized by my cousin Tyler as a "Cougar") who occasionally came to dinner parties to meet my father's remaining single friends. Besides that, it seemed like a distant threat. A tsunami whose tidal waves would never reach the perfect shores of my family island. Yet, on this snowy afternoon in February, our family beach was quickly eroding before my eyes.
