I don't speak to my family except for legal matters or when someone dies. It's been like this for some fifteen years now, which is about the half of my life.
My uncle died, as it turns out. Hadn't thought of him for years. Suddenly I was faced with the gaping difference of my opinion of him as a child versus now, judging from the same facts.
Yes! He's dead and I'm going to speak bad about him. Shocking, I know.
Earlier this year I met a woman who reminded me of my cousin. I never meet women who remind me of her! A butch but soft-hearted lesbian with a buzz cut. When we were kids everyone thought she was a boy. This woman was just like that, even the stories she shared about her family were quite familiar.
It's been years since my cousin got her heart broken. The love of her life, possibly. They were so good together, I enjoyed hanging out with them together more than with each separately. The girlfriend broke off the engagement because my cousin's family was "too wild", she said, but didn't want to break up. I didn't understand what she meant back then. They were good, tough, self-reliant people led by a strong father figure.
As a child I liked them. They wouldn't beat me, I was safe from sexual aggressors around them, stuff like that. The way they talked to me was intimidating, sure, but what are words compared to real violence.
The things that didn't filter through well for a kid were how they were willing to brutally take from anyone just so that their own children could have more material comfort. How they were always in a good mood, although it felt more like an order placed on everybody. How they spent a decade slowly and painfully building their house without any hired labor because they preferred to not take out a mortgage. They did this during the decade of the cheapest credit in the entire history of mankind.
People become this obsessed with self-reliance when they are a one-trick pony. When you're either too stupid or too stuck in your ways that you cannot deal with anything dynamic. And you will get quite far this way: All that takes is finding something super basic that kind of works and then repeating it with skull-splitting regularity for a few decades.
But if that's all you can do, then you better protect yourself from any outside interference. You're predictable. Easy to scam. Anyone who comes near you must be either fully compliant or handled in some way. Discredited, removed - that sort.
My cousin thought the task was to make her girlfriend good with her family. She made a mistake, the girlfriend was supposed to become her family instead. She's now married, to a man - you can probably picture the disgust with which my cousin puts it - has a couple of kids. My cousin has a dog.
I first ran into my cousin's doppelganger in the hostel's door, she was obviously smitten. That's a problem I often feel with men and male-adjacent creatures: When someone loves you like a man, they take everything as a yes, even a no. The easiest way to get out of the trouble then is to never engage with them at all, and that's what I did, as I always do. Perhaps I should work on my social skills to be able to get out with a bit more style.
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