Family Flashback

When my family got in a fight over winter break, my mom threatened, only half-joking:  you better not write in your blog about this.  While a revealing family feud narrative is far from my intention, the yearly—the unavoidable, the predictable—family fight is an experience common to those who travel long distances to see our kin. We do so with a mix of eager anticipation and mild trepidation because, for so many of us, visiting family has big highs and big lows.  Lofty ideals of familial perfection often lead to unmet expectations, and we find ourselves falling into the same old patterns. Despite a grass-is-always-greener mentality, no family is more perfect than the next.  An argument may be as traditional as your honey baked ham or grandmother's menorah. 

At a quarter-century, my life is mostly on track in terms of development and maturity, yet when I go home I’m met with a steep and instantaneous regression to a moody former self. This reverting back manifests in big, small and varied ways, but it always happens.

While I mostly clean up after myself in Brooklyn, I haphazardly discard clothes and dishes around my Portland home—a throwback to the teenage years of battleground bedroom.  Maybe it’s muscle memory or maybe it’s dependency on parents who still retrieve stray mugs from my nightstand. Whatever the reason, it’s still happening seven years and three states after I moved out.  In my adult life, I spend 50 hours a week mediating adolescent arguments, but when I’m in Portland I find myself enmeshed in similar debates myself. Feuding with my brother over things that don’t matter or things that still matter just a little bit too much.  Two grown-up people split up in the mini-van because proximity provokes argument. When I get irritated, I elongate my syllables like a preteen and, just like that, the mature rationality I work to maintain is shattered.  I might as well put my braces back on.

So, of course we had a family fight.  We each play the same roles as we argue about the same things.  We make up in the same ways and eat the same take-in when it’s all said and done. Each fight is like an uncanny flashback, a melancholy song left on repeat.  We say things to family members we would not say to others. Because we love more deeply, we judge and critique with more severity. We express and emote with an abandon reserved for only those closest to us.  Shortcomings are amplified, made enormous through microscopic lenses we turn only on our own.  This winter, just like every winter, everything was okay in the end. It really always is. Family seems to have a unique ability to bounce back. 

I flew back to NYC with three of my close friends.  In the airport, each casually mentioned a fight, an annoyance, a spat, an argument--all involving moms, dads, brothers, sisters. We commiserated knowingly.  Despite these minor or major difficulties, everyone had a great trip home; we agreed it was hard to say goodbye to our families.  Fighting is part of what sets family apart from the rest of the people we interact with everyday.  Maybe we fight because we can't help it, but maybe fighting reinforces bonds that need a little fine tuning.