I know I said I would post at least twice a week, however, last week was the first week of class, and so that doesn't count. Why? It just does. This week doesn't look like it will be any better, so I will ramble about something fun, since my last two posts were long and huge downers.
I started kindergarten when I was four, because my birthday was three days before the cutoff to start school. I should have been the youngest person in my class, but two other kids entered early, so I was the third youngest person. That's neither here nor there, I'm just throwing that out there. Anyway, in my school kindergarten was half day, and you were either half day morning, or half day afternoon. I was half day morning, and when I got off of the bus, it was my mom's custom to have beefaroni or soup or something else hot and fast ready for me. She would set up TV trays in front of the TV in the living room, and we would eat lunch while we watched Sesame Street. I loved that damn show. Part of my love for that show is the warm memory I have of the time my mom and I shared together, but it was also just how damn awesome the Muppets were in general.
On Sunday nights, it was a big treat for my brother and me to stay up and watch the Muppet Show. So much of what went on on The Muppet Show went flying over my head at supersonic speeds, but I loved it all the same. I watched every Muppet movie that came out.
I eventually stopped watching Sesame Street, and The Muppet Show went off the air, and I continued growing up.
When I got a little older, say middle school or early high school age, I began watching Sesame Street again and a cable channel, perhaps Nickelodeon, started re-running The Muppet Show, and I fell in love all over again. It was like rediscovering your favorite restaurant, or the place where your husband proposed, or reconnecting with your best friend. I decided right then and there that I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life - I wanted to be a Muppeteer.
Now, this wasn't a huge stretch for me, because I had been making videos with the family video camera for years, always improvised, and I loved performing. I got involved with theatre and choir in high school and I figured that I was destined for greatness. I somehow got it in my head that I had to go to Julliard in order to realize my dream, and so, one day, when I realized that I would have to audition in order to attend, my lack of self-confidence reared its ugly head, and I gave up my dream.
My love of the Muppets never really went away, though, and to this day, if I could stroll down Sesame Street and meet some Muppets, I could die the next day a happy woman.
Thank you, all of the people who made Sesame Street and the Muppet Show possible. Thank you Jim Henson, and I wish you would have gone to the doctor and gotten treatment, instead of dying. The world is not quite the same without you.
Recommended listening: It's Not That Easy Being Green, Kermit the Frog version of course!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
I Don't Care If It Hurts, I Want To Have Control. I Want A Perfect Body, I Want A Perfect Soul.
I'm going to start by saying that this post is all about weight, body image, body issues, and all that jazz. If those sorts of issues bother you or bore you, abandon ship.
I've never been happy with my body. Well, that's probably not entirely true - I bet at two years old I didn't look at my stomach, or my legs, and think, "Damn girl, you need to go on a diet!" Pre-elementary school aged me was a tomboy, and for the most part raised gender neutral. By that I mean my mom bought me dolls and Barbies, and my dad bought me footballs and Matchbox cars. I was undoubtedly bombarded with media messages about femininity, but in my own home I was permitted to be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. For a while.
My interests ran toward the rough and tumble, although I loved my play kitchen and was devastated when my brother destroyed it. As I got older, I played soccer and softball, and took ballet and tap dance lessons. I was an active little kid, with an athletically-built body. I was always one of the three shortest people in my class, so the lack of height, combined with the muscle I sported, meant that I was always going to be "thick". I don't know when I first decided I was fat, but I do remember one of the first times I remember feeling fat. I was still taking ballet lessons, so I was between the ages of four and ten. If I had to guess, I would say I was about eight, because that's when the first signs of puberty started. Anyway, that's when I decided that I would no longer go to dance class unless I had a ballet skirt on. I don't know how to describe it to you, it's a wrap skirt, almost like something you'd wear with a swimsuit nowadays, very thin and swishy. I declared that I had to have one or else I would no longer go to class. The reason, and I don't remember if I told my mom this or not, was that my butt and thighs were big, and I was ashamed of them. I don't remember if anyone made fun of me, or if this was something I decided on my own. I do remember that most of the girls in my class were tiny. The kind of stick thin that little girls often are, especially before puberty. There were perhaps one or two heavier girls in my class, and then me, who had entered into puberty already. That was the first time I decided I was fat, but it wasn't the last.
The rest of elementary school was rough. I was teased a lot, for a variety of reasons (most of which are not relevant to this post). Once I started middle school, things got worse. For one thing, middle schoolers and high schoolers rode the same bus. This started a year of what was, looking back, sexual harassment. My bus driver that year had the bright idea of assigned seating. Not a terrible idea, but she put sixth grade me in one of the back seats with a guy much older. He and some of his friends who sat nearby spent every single day sexually harassing me. They would alternate degrading my appearance (calling me a fat bitch, for instance) to threatening to rape me (which never happened, thank goodness). They had me in tears just about every day.
But the assholes on the bus weren't the only ones calling me fat and ugly, of course. Some of my classmates, mostly male, took great pleasure in calling me fat and ugly. I want to take time out to discuss what I actually weighed at that point, just for illustration. From middle school through high school, I was five feet tall, and weighed anywhere between 105 and 125, which put me in the normal range for my height. But we all know that the way any given weight looks can differ, from person to person and within a persons own life. I went through an extended awkward period and because the ideal is for a flat stomach, long thin legs, and a small shapely butt, I was called fat, even though I wasn't. I didn't have a flat stomach, my legs were never going to be long, my thighs were thick with muscles, and I had a big butt. I stopped eating breakfast and lunch, I tried to eat dinner as little as possible. I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, but I certainly tried eating as little as I could get away with. I honestly can't tell you what I looked like during that time, because when I would look in the mirror, I would see a manatee look back at me. I was of normal weight, with a fat person living in my head.
Unfortunately, the repercussions of my classmates abuse were long lasting.
Through most of middle school, all of high school, and some of college, I was depressed. My parents didn't believe in therapy, because they thought it was something shameful, so I received no support there. My high school's guidance counselor was of no help because she didn't think my feelings were very serious. In college, I used the campus's free counseling, but I didn't like it.
Eventually, I stopped thinking about my body. I met a great guy, we got married, and I was the happiest I've ever been. Life went on. Then a funny think happened. I looked in the mirror, really looked, and realized I had put on weight. I got on a scale, and realized with horror that I weighed 215 pounds, a full 100 pounds more than I did in high school! Apparently, I became an overweight person with a normal weight person living in my head, because I didn't see what the mirror and the scale were now telling me. So, I joined a weight-loss group, lost 40 pounds, and felt pretty good about myself.
I bet you think you know where there is going, right? I get back down to my high school weight and live happily ever after. Nope. I regain half of the 40 pounds I lost, because I started graduate school while still working full time, and I barely have time to sleep, let alone run on the treadmill an hour a day like I did before. Plus, I was diagnosed with a disorder, one that makes it more difficult to lose weight (that's for a different post). I had a brief period of body acceptance, and now I hate myself again. I can't find clothes that I like in my size and I hate everything about my body. I hate that celebrities, the ideals that we are supposed to aspire to, are Photoshopped to hell and back on magazine covers and in ads, so that the ideal we are supposed to achieve, they aren't even achieving.
But do you know what I hate the most? The following:
A poll conducted by a popular women's magazine found that 75% of women thought they were "too fat" (Glamour,1984). A large scale survey conducted by Garner (1997) found body dissatisfaction to be "increasing at a faster rate than ever before" among both men and women (p. 34). He found that 89% of the 3,452 female respondents wanted to lose weight.
Many women suffer from body dissatisfaction, and assiduous dieting and the relentless pursuit of thinness has become a normative behavior among women in Western society (Rodin, Silberstein & Striegel-Moore,1984). Thinness has not only come to represent attractiveness, but also has come to symbolize success, self-control and higher socioeconomic status. Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. estimated the size of the weight loss industry for 1994 at $32,680 billion.
Body image dissatisfaction and dieting behavior isn't restricted to adolescents or adults. In a study of almost five hundred schoolgirls, 81% of the ten-year-olds reported that they had dieted at least once (Mellin, Scully & Irwin, 1986). A study of 36,000 students in Minnesota found that girls with negative body image were three times more likely than boys of the same age, to say that they feel badly about themselves and were more likely to believe that others see them in a negative light. The study also found that negative body image is associated with suicide risk for girls, not for boys (American Association of University Women, 1990).
Bar-Tal and Sax (1961) found that our culture places a higher value on physical beauty in the evaluation of females than males. Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz & Thompson (1980), have found that the average size of idealized woman (as portrayed by models), has become progressively thinner and has stabilized at 13-19% below physically expected weight. Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegelmoore (1984), suggest that this thin ideal is unachievable for most women and is likely to lead to feelings of self-devaluation, feelings of dysphoria (depression) and helplessness.
Shame seems to be another component of women's attitudes toward their bodies. In a Kinsey survey it was found that women felt more embarrassed when asked about their weight, than when they were asked about their masturbation practices, or occurrences of homosexual affairs (Kinsey et al., 1953).
Women and girls are also consistently taught from an early age that their self-worth is largely dependent on how they look. The fact that women earn more money than men in only two job categories, those of modeling and prostitution serves to illustrate this point (Wolf, 1992).
In a sample of male and female high school students, two-thirds of boys and girls believed that being thinner would have an impact on their lives. The majority of girls believed that this impact would be positive, while the majority of the boys believed that the impact would be negative. The gender groups did not differ significantly in their weight distribution around the expected norm for their group. Girls had higher body dissatisfaction scores than boys on all measures. Girls reported magazines as their primary source of information regarding diet and health, whereas boys reported their primary source to be parents, followed by two other categories before mentioning magazines (Paxton, Wertheim, Gibbons, Szmukler, Hillier, & Petrovich, 1991).
Dieting is more common than not dieting, with 95% of the female population having dieted at some time (Polivy & Herman, 1987). Dieting has been as a powerful contributor to dysphoria because of the failure often associated with this type of weight loss method, 95-98% of all dieter regain their weight (Heatherton & Polivy, 1992; Cooke, 1996, p.35). Caloric deprivation experiments have shown to produce depression, anxiety and irritability (Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen & Taylor, 1950). A sobering finding is that most bulimics report that the onset of their eating disorder occurred during a period of dieting (Hall & Hay, 1991).
A study that explored social and economic consequences of overweight found that women who were overweight were 20% less likely to be married at a later point, and had a household income that was $6,710 less than non-overweight women. Overweight men were 11% less likely to get married, yet their income was not significantly different from their non-overweight counterparts (cited in Exacting Beauty, by Thompson, Heiberg, Altabe, and Tantleff-Dunn, p. 50).
These facts provided by About Face.
Women shouldn't feel ashamed of their bodies from the time they are young. They shouldn't hate themselves, to the point of developing eating disorders or becoming suicidal. There is something wrong with a society that does this to their women. I don't have an answer, I'm just another voice crying for change.
Recommended listening: Radiohead's Creep, for one, since that's where the title of this post comes from. True Colors, by Cyndi Lauper.
I've never been happy with my body. Well, that's probably not entirely true - I bet at two years old I didn't look at my stomach, or my legs, and think, "Damn girl, you need to go on a diet!" Pre-elementary school aged me was a tomboy, and for the most part raised gender neutral. By that I mean my mom bought me dolls and Barbies, and my dad bought me footballs and Matchbox cars. I was undoubtedly bombarded with media messages about femininity, but in my own home I was permitted to be whoever and whatever I wanted to be. For a while.
My interests ran toward the rough and tumble, although I loved my play kitchen and was devastated when my brother destroyed it. As I got older, I played soccer and softball, and took ballet and tap dance lessons. I was an active little kid, with an athletically-built body. I was always one of the three shortest people in my class, so the lack of height, combined with the muscle I sported, meant that I was always going to be "thick". I don't know when I first decided I was fat, but I do remember one of the first times I remember feeling fat. I was still taking ballet lessons, so I was between the ages of four and ten. If I had to guess, I would say I was about eight, because that's when the first signs of puberty started. Anyway, that's when I decided that I would no longer go to dance class unless I had a ballet skirt on. I don't know how to describe it to you, it's a wrap skirt, almost like something you'd wear with a swimsuit nowadays, very thin and swishy. I declared that I had to have one or else I would no longer go to class. The reason, and I don't remember if I told my mom this or not, was that my butt and thighs were big, and I was ashamed of them. I don't remember if anyone made fun of me, or if this was something I decided on my own. I do remember that most of the girls in my class were tiny. The kind of stick thin that little girls often are, especially before puberty. There were perhaps one or two heavier girls in my class, and then me, who had entered into puberty already. That was the first time I decided I was fat, but it wasn't the last.
The rest of elementary school was rough. I was teased a lot, for a variety of reasons (most of which are not relevant to this post). Once I started middle school, things got worse. For one thing, middle schoolers and high schoolers rode the same bus. This started a year of what was, looking back, sexual harassment. My bus driver that year had the bright idea of assigned seating. Not a terrible idea, but she put sixth grade me in one of the back seats with a guy much older. He and some of his friends who sat nearby spent every single day sexually harassing me. They would alternate degrading my appearance (calling me a fat bitch, for instance) to threatening to rape me (which never happened, thank goodness). They had me in tears just about every day.
But the assholes on the bus weren't the only ones calling me fat and ugly, of course. Some of my classmates, mostly male, took great pleasure in calling me fat and ugly. I want to take time out to discuss what I actually weighed at that point, just for illustration. From middle school through high school, I was five feet tall, and weighed anywhere between 105 and 125, which put me in the normal range for my height. But we all know that the way any given weight looks can differ, from person to person and within a persons own life. I went through an extended awkward period and because the ideal is for a flat stomach, long thin legs, and a small shapely butt, I was called fat, even though I wasn't. I didn't have a flat stomach, my legs were never going to be long, my thighs were thick with muscles, and I had a big butt. I stopped eating breakfast and lunch, I tried to eat dinner as little as possible. I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, but I certainly tried eating as little as I could get away with. I honestly can't tell you what I looked like during that time, because when I would look in the mirror, I would see a manatee look back at me. I was of normal weight, with a fat person living in my head.
Unfortunately, the repercussions of my classmates abuse were long lasting.
Through most of middle school, all of high school, and some of college, I was depressed. My parents didn't believe in therapy, because they thought it was something shameful, so I received no support there. My high school's guidance counselor was of no help because she didn't think my feelings were very serious. In college, I used the campus's free counseling, but I didn't like it.
Eventually, I stopped thinking about my body. I met a great guy, we got married, and I was the happiest I've ever been. Life went on. Then a funny think happened. I looked in the mirror, really looked, and realized I had put on weight. I got on a scale, and realized with horror that I weighed 215 pounds, a full 100 pounds more than I did in high school! Apparently, I became an overweight person with a normal weight person living in my head, because I didn't see what the mirror and the scale were now telling me. So, I joined a weight-loss group, lost 40 pounds, and felt pretty good about myself.
I bet you think you know where there is going, right? I get back down to my high school weight and live happily ever after. Nope. I regain half of the 40 pounds I lost, because I started graduate school while still working full time, and I barely have time to sleep, let alone run on the treadmill an hour a day like I did before. Plus, I was diagnosed with a disorder, one that makes it more difficult to lose weight (that's for a different post). I had a brief period of body acceptance, and now I hate myself again. I can't find clothes that I like in my size and I hate everything about my body. I hate that celebrities, the ideals that we are supposed to aspire to, are Photoshopped to hell and back on magazine covers and in ads, so that the ideal we are supposed to achieve, they aren't even achieving.
But do you know what I hate the most? The following:
A poll conducted by a popular women's magazine found that 75% of women thought they were "too fat" (Glamour,1984). A large scale survey conducted by Garner (1997) found body dissatisfaction to be "increasing at a faster rate than ever before" among both men and women (p. 34). He found that 89% of the 3,452 female respondents wanted to lose weight.
Many women suffer from body dissatisfaction, and assiduous dieting and the relentless pursuit of thinness has become a normative behavior among women in Western society (Rodin, Silberstein & Striegel-Moore,1984). Thinness has not only come to represent attractiveness, but also has come to symbolize success, self-control and higher socioeconomic status. Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. estimated the size of the weight loss industry for 1994 at $32,680 billion.
Body image dissatisfaction and dieting behavior isn't restricted to adolescents or adults. In a study of almost five hundred schoolgirls, 81% of the ten-year-olds reported that they had dieted at least once (Mellin, Scully & Irwin, 1986). A study of 36,000 students in Minnesota found that girls with negative body image were three times more likely than boys of the same age, to say that they feel badly about themselves and were more likely to believe that others see them in a negative light. The study also found that negative body image is associated with suicide risk for girls, not for boys (American Association of University Women, 1990).
Bar-Tal and Sax (1961) found that our culture places a higher value on physical beauty in the evaluation of females than males. Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz & Thompson (1980), have found that the average size of idealized woman (as portrayed by models), has become progressively thinner and has stabilized at 13-19% below physically expected weight. Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegelmoore (1984), suggest that this thin ideal is unachievable for most women and is likely to lead to feelings of self-devaluation, feelings of dysphoria (depression) and helplessness.
Shame seems to be another component of women's attitudes toward their bodies. In a Kinsey survey it was found that women felt more embarrassed when asked about their weight, than when they were asked about their masturbation practices, or occurrences of homosexual affairs (Kinsey et al., 1953).
Women and girls are also consistently taught from an early age that their self-worth is largely dependent on how they look. The fact that women earn more money than men in only two job categories, those of modeling and prostitution serves to illustrate this point (Wolf, 1992).
In a sample of male and female high school students, two-thirds of boys and girls believed that being thinner would have an impact on their lives. The majority of girls believed that this impact would be positive, while the majority of the boys believed that the impact would be negative. The gender groups did not differ significantly in their weight distribution around the expected norm for their group. Girls had higher body dissatisfaction scores than boys on all measures. Girls reported magazines as their primary source of information regarding diet and health, whereas boys reported their primary source to be parents, followed by two other categories before mentioning magazines (Paxton, Wertheim, Gibbons, Szmukler, Hillier, & Petrovich, 1991).
Dieting is more common than not dieting, with 95% of the female population having dieted at some time (Polivy & Herman, 1987). Dieting has been as a powerful contributor to dysphoria because of the failure often associated with this type of weight loss method, 95-98% of all dieter regain their weight (Heatherton & Polivy, 1992; Cooke, 1996, p.35). Caloric deprivation experiments have shown to produce depression, anxiety and irritability (Keys, Brozek, Henschel, Mickelsen & Taylor, 1950). A sobering finding is that most bulimics report that the onset of their eating disorder occurred during a period of dieting (Hall & Hay, 1991).
A study that explored social and economic consequences of overweight found that women who were overweight were 20% less likely to be married at a later point, and had a household income that was $6,710 less than non-overweight women. Overweight men were 11% less likely to get married, yet their income was not significantly different from their non-overweight counterparts (cited in Exacting Beauty, by Thompson, Heiberg, Altabe, and Tantleff-Dunn, p. 50).
These facts provided by About Face.
Women shouldn't feel ashamed of their bodies from the time they are young. They shouldn't hate themselves, to the point of developing eating disorders or becoming suicidal. There is something wrong with a society that does this to their women. I don't have an answer, I'm just another voice crying for change.
Recommended listening: Radiohead's Creep, for one, since that's where the title of this post comes from. True Colors, by Cyndi Lauper.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
I Am Green With Family Envy
Growing up, I envied my friends. They all seemed to come from large, close-knit families, and I wished I had a family like that. I wanted cousins that were like siblings, grandparents that were warm and involved in my life, a bounty of people who loved and cared about me. Before I go any further, let me say up front that I am very lucky because my family loves me, my parents were able to put food on the table, clothes on my back, and didn’t beat me or abuse me. Having said that, I still had family envy.
To best illustrate WHY I have family envy, it might be best if I introduce you to my family. My dad’s side is Irish-Catholic, which takes care of the large part, but we aren’t particularly close. Dad has three sisters, who are all married with children (I think – I wouldn’t swear to it, but at least two of the three are at least), and his mother is still living. His father died right after he married my mother, which was not a statement about the marriage, but a brain aneurysm, so I never met him.< My parents had two children: me (the oldest and a girl) and my almost four year younger brother. I have been told, and I have the vaguest memories of this, that one of my dad’s sisters and her husband and kids lived with us for a while when I was very young. I think one of her children, a girl, was my age and we went trick-or-treating together. For some reason, my dad’s mother and his sisters, spouses, and children decided to follow their manifest destiny and go west when I was around four. After this, I did not see or speak to any of them again until I was in my thirties.
My dad’s mother would send my brother and me birthday cards every year, and the year that parents were trampling each other in order to get Cabbage Patch Kids, my dad’s mother sent me one! (I still have it - her name is Levina) Then one year, not long after the Cabbage Patch Kid birthday, the cards stopped. Maybe I didn’t send a thank you card or something, I don’t know. My mom didn’t do a great job instilling manners in us. We knew how to behave in public, but since we didn’t interact with other kids very much, we weren’t good with “pleases” and “thank yous” so it is entirely possible that I did not send a thank you note. I would have been eight. I’m sure my mom thanked her, since she and my mom were pen-pals.
Anyway, when I went off to college, I decided to try to get to know my dad’s family on my own. I was an adult, after all, and I could make my own way. I got everyone’s addresses (the relatives out west, and the more distantly related relatives who were spatially closer) and I sent every single family member a Christmas card, with a handwritten note, expressing my heartfelt desire to get to know them better, and my hope to hear from them soon, by the way, here’s my dorm address! I didn’t hear from one of them. Not one.
I got married a few years later, and my dad’s mother asked my mom what the colors of our bathroom were. I can only assume that she was going to knit or crochet something, since that’s something that she does. I’ll never know, since it has been eleven years since I got married, and I’ve never gotten so much as a card from her. Let me be clear: I don’t care that she didn’t send a gift, but I would have loved a card.
A few years after I got married, there was a big family reunion, and one of my dad’s sisters came, with her husband and her children (I think that was all of her children? Maybe she has more.) I was excited! Despite getting no response from any overture I had made in the past, I was sure being face to face would be different! The female cousin was happy to see me – I guess she’s the one who when trick-or-treating with me? She seemed to know an awful lot about me, and I knew nothing about her. My aunt didn’t seem to care about talking to me at all, which was a bummer, so I decided to find something to talk to her about. This aunt loves genealogy; it is a hobby and a passion. She brought the family trees (she’s done both sides of my dad’s family and some of my mom’s) for my folks to look at. I looked at my dad’s and immediately saw that my birthday was wrong. The year and month were right, but the date was off my three or four days. I told her, and she barely acknowledged that I spoke, and ignore me for the rest of the time she was there. The next year, she came back, this time with my dad’s mother. I didn’t go. My dad was angry, because he is of the belief that family is family, not matter what they do to you, or what effort you put in to the relationship. I decided differently.
My mom’s family, on the other hand, all lived in Ohio, except for my mom’s one sister. Here’s where the names are all changed for privacy’s sake, otherwise you would never follow this. My mom is one of four children. There’s William, her oldest sibling, and his wife Mary, and their daughter Diana. My mom comes next in birth order, along with her twin sister Marsha. Marsha is single, having never married and never had children. My mom’s youngest sibling is Kelly. Kelly was married to Todd, but I don’t remember him at all, because they lived out of state for most of their marriage. Kelly divorced Todd, which is just as well, since, from what I’ve heard, Todd was an abusive ass. Kelly has five children: Ann-Marie, Jack, Greg, Lisa and Amber. Lisa and I were close in age, and Diana, Amber, and my brother were all close in age.
Growing up, my mom’s family all got together once a year, at Thanksgiving. We gathered at either my house or William’s house. I think we went to Kelly’s house once when she was living in Ohio, and once at Marsha’s house. Although this was the only time the entire family got together, we would visit my mother’s parents one or two other times a year, and we saw Marsha quite often. Here is where the envy really kicked in, because I had all this family, most of it within a two hour drive, and I only saw it once a year! My friends had cousins they saw regularly, like they were built in friends. Every year I spent half of Thanksgiving Day getting over my shyness and reacquainting myself with my cousins, and by the time the day was over, I was begging my mom to let me hang out with my cousin Lisa more often, and I didn’t understand why she always said no. I was saddened by my mom’s refusal, because I always wanted a sister, and I figured my cousin Lisa was the closest thing I would ever have to one. I found out many years later that there was some bad blood between my mom and Kelly (mostly my mom holding a grudge), and that was most likely why she said no.
My mom’s mother died when I was fourteen, and we stopped getting together for Thanksgiving after that. We would still go see my mom’s father once or twice a year, but I rarely saw William or Kelly after that. My mom’s father lived into his 90s, and long enough for me to bring my husband around to see him. He wasn’t mobile enough to travel the two hours one-way to come to the ceremony, but he was able to watch the videotape. Over the years, I have seen Kelly and her kids on various occasions, but we’re still not that close. I’ve friended a few of my cousins on Facebook and Twitter, and we keep in touch that way, but for the most part we’re all content to be anti-social. Except for Kelly, because if it were up to her, we would be a close-knit family that got together on a regular basis. So, you probably think that I get together with Kelly and her kids on a regular basis. I do not. For one thing, her kids live all over the country, so it is not that easy to all get together. For another, Kelly tires me out. She's high energy and always has to be the center of attention, always talking. It's exhausting and annoying to be around her. I don't mind seeing her a couple times a year, but that's it.
My husband has two siblings, and nieces and nephews, and both parents are still living. He also has aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, they all live hours and hours away, and we see them once every three or four years. His family is a close-knit family, and I envy that.
I’ve thought about trying to forge closer ties with my mom’s family, but it’s difficult because we are so spread out geographically, and we are all so busy. My aunt Marsha, who has always been like a second mother to me, is the family member who is closest to me geographically, and we are closer now than we have ever been.
If you’ve read this far (and I have my doubts), you may be wondering about my immediate family. My dad and I don’t get along. We’re better now than we used to be. I’ve learned to just ignore the things about him that used to anger me, and he stopped being so nasty to me once I was married off and taken care of. Yes, he is that backward. He couldn’t stop worrying about my future, but not in a good parental way, in a patriarchical, sexist way, and it affected our relationship. He stopped once I had a man to take care of me, and I wasn’t his responsibility anymore. My mom and I are not as close as we used to be. Part of that is my dad’s fault, because he won’t let us talk on the phone without being a part of the conversation. He’s afraid we’re talking about him. Because they live two hours away from me, I don’t get to hang out with my mom or have mother-daughter chats like some women get to have with their mothers. My brother and I have no relationship. Nothing happened, we just have nothing in common and struggle to find anything to talk to each other about. When my parents are both gone, I have no doubt we’ll forget the other one exists.
I’m not sure what my thought was in writing this. Partly catharsis, partly sharing. I’m not convinced I’ll even post this. It’s long and boring. I guess sometimes I feel alone. You graduate college, get moving on your life, and if you didn’t make the kind of friendships that last forever, you eventually find yourself an adult, perhaps in a new place, with no friends. Making friends as an adult is HARD, so you already feel alone, and if you don’t have much family, you feel even more alone. Perhaps that’s why I wrote this, in order to express my lonely feelings. I’m not sure.
Thanks for reading this, if you did. I promise my next post will be more fun. Suggested listening for this post: The Living Years by Mike & the Mechanics.
To best illustrate WHY I have family envy, it might be best if I introduce you to my family. My dad’s side is Irish-Catholic, which takes care of the large part, but we aren’t particularly close. Dad has three sisters, who are all married with children (I think – I wouldn’t swear to it, but at least two of the three are at least), and his mother is still living. His father died right after he married my mother, which was not a statement about the marriage, but a brain aneurysm, so I never met him.< My parents had two children: me (the oldest and a girl) and my almost four year younger brother. I have been told, and I have the vaguest memories of this, that one of my dad’s sisters and her husband and kids lived with us for a while when I was very young. I think one of her children, a girl, was my age and we went trick-or-treating together. For some reason, my dad’s mother and his sisters, spouses, and children decided to follow their manifest destiny and go west when I was around four. After this, I did not see or speak to any of them again until I was in my thirties.
My dad’s mother would send my brother and me birthday cards every year, and the year that parents were trampling each other in order to get Cabbage Patch Kids, my dad’s mother sent me one! (I still have it - her name is Levina) Then one year, not long after the Cabbage Patch Kid birthday, the cards stopped. Maybe I didn’t send a thank you card or something, I don’t know. My mom didn’t do a great job instilling manners in us. We knew how to behave in public, but since we didn’t interact with other kids very much, we weren’t good with “pleases” and “thank yous” so it is entirely possible that I did not send a thank you note. I would have been eight. I’m sure my mom thanked her, since she and my mom were pen-pals.
Anyway, when I went off to college, I decided to try to get to know my dad’s family on my own. I was an adult, after all, and I could make my own way. I got everyone’s addresses (the relatives out west, and the more distantly related relatives who were spatially closer) and I sent every single family member a Christmas card, with a handwritten note, expressing my heartfelt desire to get to know them better, and my hope to hear from them soon, by the way, here’s my dorm address! I didn’t hear from one of them. Not one.
I got married a few years later, and my dad’s mother asked my mom what the colors of our bathroom were. I can only assume that she was going to knit or crochet something, since that’s something that she does. I’ll never know, since it has been eleven years since I got married, and I’ve never gotten so much as a card from her. Let me be clear: I don’t care that she didn’t send a gift, but I would have loved a card.
A few years after I got married, there was a big family reunion, and one of my dad’s sisters came, with her husband and her children (I think that was all of her children? Maybe she has more.) I was excited! Despite getting no response from any overture I had made in the past, I was sure being face to face would be different! The female cousin was happy to see me – I guess she’s the one who when trick-or-treating with me? She seemed to know an awful lot about me, and I knew nothing about her. My aunt didn’t seem to care about talking to me at all, which was a bummer, so I decided to find something to talk to her about. This aunt loves genealogy; it is a hobby and a passion. She brought the family trees (she’s done both sides of my dad’s family and some of my mom’s) for my folks to look at. I looked at my dad’s and immediately saw that my birthday was wrong. The year and month were right, but the date was off my three or four days. I told her, and she barely acknowledged that I spoke, and ignore me for the rest of the time she was there. The next year, she came back, this time with my dad’s mother. I didn’t go. My dad was angry, because he is of the belief that family is family, not matter what they do to you, or what effort you put in to the relationship. I decided differently.
My mom’s family, on the other hand, all lived in Ohio, except for my mom’s one sister. Here’s where the names are all changed for privacy’s sake, otherwise you would never follow this. My mom is one of four children. There’s William, her oldest sibling, and his wife Mary, and their daughter Diana. My mom comes next in birth order, along with her twin sister Marsha. Marsha is single, having never married and never had children. My mom’s youngest sibling is Kelly. Kelly was married to Todd, but I don’t remember him at all, because they lived out of state for most of their marriage. Kelly divorced Todd, which is just as well, since, from what I’ve heard, Todd was an abusive ass. Kelly has five children: Ann-Marie, Jack, Greg, Lisa and Amber. Lisa and I were close in age, and Diana, Amber, and my brother were all close in age.
Growing up, my mom’s family all got together once a year, at Thanksgiving. We gathered at either my house or William’s house. I think we went to Kelly’s house once when she was living in Ohio, and once at Marsha’s house. Although this was the only time the entire family got together, we would visit my mother’s parents one or two other times a year, and we saw Marsha quite often. Here is where the envy really kicked in, because I had all this family, most of it within a two hour drive, and I only saw it once a year! My friends had cousins they saw regularly, like they were built in friends. Every year I spent half of Thanksgiving Day getting over my shyness and reacquainting myself with my cousins, and by the time the day was over, I was begging my mom to let me hang out with my cousin Lisa more often, and I didn’t understand why she always said no. I was saddened by my mom’s refusal, because I always wanted a sister, and I figured my cousin Lisa was the closest thing I would ever have to one. I found out many years later that there was some bad blood between my mom and Kelly (mostly my mom holding a grudge), and that was most likely why she said no.
My mom’s mother died when I was fourteen, and we stopped getting together for Thanksgiving after that. We would still go see my mom’s father once or twice a year, but I rarely saw William or Kelly after that. My mom’s father lived into his 90s, and long enough for me to bring my husband around to see him. He wasn’t mobile enough to travel the two hours one-way to come to the ceremony, but he was able to watch the videotape. Over the years, I have seen Kelly and her kids on various occasions, but we’re still not that close. I’ve friended a few of my cousins on Facebook and Twitter, and we keep in touch that way, but for the most part we’re all content to be anti-social. Except for Kelly, because if it were up to her, we would be a close-knit family that got together on a regular basis. So, you probably think that I get together with Kelly and her kids on a regular basis. I do not. For one thing, her kids live all over the country, so it is not that easy to all get together. For another, Kelly tires me out. She's high energy and always has to be the center of attention, always talking. It's exhausting and annoying to be around her. I don't mind seeing her a couple times a year, but that's it.
My husband has two siblings, and nieces and nephews, and both parents are still living. He also has aunts and uncles. Unfortunately, they all live hours and hours away, and we see them once every three or four years. His family is a close-knit family, and I envy that.
I’ve thought about trying to forge closer ties with my mom’s family, but it’s difficult because we are so spread out geographically, and we are all so busy. My aunt Marsha, who has always been like a second mother to me, is the family member who is closest to me geographically, and we are closer now than we have ever been.
If you’ve read this far (and I have my doubts), you may be wondering about my immediate family. My dad and I don’t get along. We’re better now than we used to be. I’ve learned to just ignore the things about him that used to anger me, and he stopped being so nasty to me once I was married off and taken care of. Yes, he is that backward. He couldn’t stop worrying about my future, but not in a good parental way, in a patriarchical, sexist way, and it affected our relationship. He stopped once I had a man to take care of me, and I wasn’t his responsibility anymore. My mom and I are not as close as we used to be. Part of that is my dad’s fault, because he won’t let us talk on the phone without being a part of the conversation. He’s afraid we’re talking about him. Because they live two hours away from me, I don’t get to hang out with my mom or have mother-daughter chats like some women get to have with their mothers. My brother and I have no relationship. Nothing happened, we just have nothing in common and struggle to find anything to talk to each other about. When my parents are both gone, I have no doubt we’ll forget the other one exists.
I’m not sure what my thought was in writing this. Partly catharsis, partly sharing. I’m not convinced I’ll even post this. It’s long and boring. I guess sometimes I feel alone. You graduate college, get moving on your life, and if you didn’t make the kind of friendships that last forever, you eventually find yourself an adult, perhaps in a new place, with no friends. Making friends as an adult is HARD, so you already feel alone, and if you don’t have much family, you feel even more alone. Perhaps that’s why I wrote this, in order to express my lonely feelings. I’m not sure.
Thanks for reading this, if you did. I promise my next post will be more fun. Suggested listening for this post: The Living Years by Mike & the Mechanics.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Blog Post
I swore this wouldn't happen.
I swore I wouldn't be one of those people who started a blog, wrote one or two posts, then abanodoned it. I decided to be realistic, and aim for no fewer than two posts a week. I figured that if I posted more, great, but if I didn't, as long as I hit the two post minimum, I was good to go. I started carrying a little notebook with me, so that if I had ideas for blog posts when I was away from a computer, I wouldn't forget them. I have pages and pages of ideas, plenty to get me through weeks of blog posts.
See? This shouldn't have happened.
June was about to turn into July, and I was in the middle of summer session. The grind was even harder than normal, since the semester was shorter than normal, but I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. I decided to write a post about Canada, on Canada Day, for a number of reasons I won't get into here, since I still plan on writing that post someday.
And then my cat started peeing on the floor. I was in denial, because I knew what that meant.
Before I go any further, I guess I should take a moment to briefly introduce the crew.
First we have Boo, queen bee, and at twelve she’s been with me longer than my husband has. Seen here doing what she does best - laying down and giving the stink eye. You might think this story is about her, but it’s not.
Next, we have Marty, the pug, seen here doing one of the things he loves best. Marty will likely have many posts dedicated to his tomfoolery, so I won’t say much about him now.
And last, but not least, is Booger. Do not let the shy look fool you; he is a holy terror. Booger is my pee-er. Seven years ago, Booger was diagnosed with urinary crystals, and so I knew what peeing on the floor meant. It meant rounds of fluid injections under the skin, overnight stays with the vet, painkillers (for him, not me), and a lot of discomfort and pain for him (and for my wallet) before all was said and done. Marty had just had a nice expensive couple of trips to the vet, and after it was all said and done, Booger had an almost three week adventure, and my bank account was a lot lighter.
By this point, the semester was almost over, friends were marrying, moving, wanting to be social, and so I was busy. I’m going to try to update this more often again, because I hope that this will keep me sane during this last year of school.
Recommended listening: One Thing Leads To Another by The Fixx
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