Are We Family, or what?

(This is not a particularly cheery post, so feel free to skip it and go do something nice like hugging your kids. I won’t mind.)

I should let you know that I’m unqualified to give advice about building healthy relationships with your parents and siblings. I may have already told you that, but I’m saying it again: my relationship with my family is a mess. And the worst kind of mess is the one sitting in the middle of a bunch of people who have no idea how to fix it, and they just can’t stand the idea of getting their hands dirty again. No one trusts anybody, there’s no peaceable middle ground to work towards, and most of the players don’t even know what they want out of this family.

And this is not coming up as a result of some kind of great and terrible battle between my mother and I, or some other falling out. It’s not a familial cataclysm, but a slow ceasing of momentum that grinds us to a halt.

For the longest time, I had assumed that the arrival of grandkids would realign our family dynamic and bring us together. We’d throw all of the baggage aside and just build a new workable peace based on the new little ones. It didn’t work that way.

I was stunned when my mother was talking about wills and inheritances recently, and she said she was only thinking of her kids, not the grandkids. The potential exception she gave was if she formed a ‘close bond’ with one of the kids, and that really cheesed me off. You can’t sit back and wait for a kids to like you before you care for them. You have to have an excess of affection and you have to work at building that relationship. But I digress.

There is an additional element of family sadness looming in the background of all of this. According to my mother, my estranged father is very ill somewhere, losing his faculties, and generally approaching the end of his life. My brother still holds a deep resentment and perhaps active hatred for our father, and it can’t help his emotional situation that his daughter has some of my father’s facial features. I know my visual similarity to my father constantly reminded my mother of him, and she couldn’t help but see his negative traits in me. Being compared to you drunk father can really monkey wrench your self-esteem.

So that’s a partial snapshot of my messed up family: my brother is angry, probably angry at me for my teenage screwup years. My mother has emotional expectations that I cannot meet: She wants a return to a relationship between us that stopped when I was 12, and she won’t let us start over. And somewhere, in some medical facility, my father who I have not seen or spoken to in more than 20 years  is slowly dying and I don’t know how I feel about that.

I don’t think my mother even understands how ill he is. She mentioned that she had received a letter from a hospice offering her support, and she didn’t understand why they were contacting her. She doesn’t know that a hospice offers care and help for the terminally ill and their families. For all I know, he may have already died. I assume someone would tell me if he did. That may be the saddest thing I have ever typed. Yikes.

Sorry, faithful readers, but I have to process this somewhere. It can’t be sunshine everyday.Anyway, I order all of you to find someone you love and lavish affection on them. And yes, that someone can be yourself. Cookies for everyone!

Next in the series: I am not a Theologian

I have a new theory about the appeal of Scientology. Hopefully it doesn’t cheese Tom Cruise off, but I can’t control what crazy people do.

I had a stress headache  the other day, lingering around my eyes and making things generally uncomfortable. As I was enduring the admittedly mild suffering and making a very boring list of the contributing factors for my headache, I thought that it would be much easier to blame some kind of headache demon or devil for my misery. And it’s not just me: humanity loves having a scapegoat. The trouble is, at least for the more reserved branches of Christianity, the idea of demonic afflictions went from literal possession to metaphor. Especially amongst the upper class and white-collar population, there was a shortage of scapegoats that fit their busy modern lifestyles. This is where the Scientologists and their Thetans come in. Now you have a new mythology that gives you a quick easy answer to your dilemmas. Got a headache? Thetan. Feeling anxious about a public speaking commitment? Thetans. It’s a simple answer to the eternal question “who can I blame this on?” And then the church offers you a long, expensive and complicated plan to rid yourself of these horrors. It makes a kind of sense, because if it didn’t cost you a bundle and it wasn’t arduous, you’d have trouble believing that it was helping you.

The other upside of having a scapegoat is that you don’t have to be as introspective as usual. There’s nothing more deflating then tracing the cause of your suffering right back to your own choices again and again. Then again, this is the only way to suss out why you make those choices and to avoid making them again. Ah, free will.

“Stop complaining. It’s just for kids.”

This is the worst argument I have ever heard in support of a terrible piece of art. Why would anyone think it was valid to excuse terrible television or filmmaking just because the target audience is children?

This specific argument came up in reaction to one of my diatribes on the Star Wars prequels. You know-the movies where robots were made to be clumsy and funny? Yeah, those.  Because that is EXACTLY how I would design my robot servants if I was a militaristic empire bent on galactic conquest: thousands of little stooges bumping into each other and making funny little sounds when they have an oopsies.

I will acknowledge that I tend to passionately examine and talk about the art I encounter, and sometimes, people just want to enjoy a movie without hearing a blowhard go on and on about how it could be better. But defending the awful plot holes and terrible character treatments in the Star Wars prequels by saying that they were “written for kids” is insulting. Kids deserve quality filmmaking, even if they can’t fully grasp the elements within the film that make it great. Bad dialogue teaches our kids to speak poorly, and weak characters give them bad role models.

And let’s take a closer look at some other kids movies. The Toy Story movies are “written for kids” but they have a heart and a stirring sense of artistic direction that makes me glad to watch them with the little dude.  Heck, let’s just put all of the Pixar films in the list of great movies. The good folks at Pixar have a real dedication to the art of storytelling, and they celebrate their young audience instead of talking down to them.

Listen, I know it’s nice to enjoy a big, dumb movie without worrying about how much sense it makes. Sometimes you want to turn your brain off and just have some pretty lights flash in front of your eyes.  But don’t defend your fondness for the occasional piece of entertainment candy by claiming it’s “made for kids”.  Kids deserve better. In fact, they deserve to have the best stories told to them: the stories that warm their heart, bolster their courage, foster their sense of compassion, and make them feel as wonderful as we think they are.