Family Fun

Lately, I have, for some reason, become acutely aware of the life cycle of a "typical" person's desire to spend time with her family. (A disclaimer here: I have no idea what a "typical" person entails, really, and insufficient knowledge to take cultural differences into account. Nor do I possess the proper scientific background to support my claims. But I couldn't figure out any other way to phrase it, since what I'm about to say doesn't exactly describe me, and I can't speak for anyone else.)

We are born with an intense desire to spend time with our parents, especially any of them who happen to be breast feeding. I see this stage manifested in The Boy's bellows of "Mommy!" even when the second Mommy picks him up he kicks his legs and pikes energetically in a move designed to make her drop him one day if she isn't careful.

Some time between the age of The Boy's youngest cousin -- who is 11 and loves to spend time with her family -- and her brother -- who is 14 and begged off coming to visit us last week with some excuse that sounded to me like it had to do with washing the car (although his mother insists he's done no such thing this week or ever) -- things change. We enter that stage of adolescent cantankerousness that includes a violent aversion to anything that smacks of spending time with one's family. Eventually, we grow out of adolescence into something approximating adulthood, and we like spending time with our families again.

Some of us, it turns out, never really make it to that adulthood stage.

For example, I've been married to Hubby for almost four years, lived with him for almost five, and I'm just now getting the hang of wanting to hang out with family.

It could be that I merely entered the adolescent aversion stage a bit late. I recall my mother cleverly delaying it when I was in my early teens with frequent Saturday shopping trips on her credit card. It probably helped that my sister went away to college just as I hit my teenage years and packed enough parental hostility into her trips home for the both of us. Plus, I figured I kind of scored getting to be the only child at an age where I could appreciate it.

But somewhere along the line it finally kicked in, and -- as my recent move from 15 miles south of my parents' house to 2,500 miles east illustrates -- I haven't really recovered.

I was getting there -- at least where Hubby's family was concerned -- in the first couple years of my marriage. Hubby is one of those curious sorts who never seems to have gone through the aversion stage. I still marvel at how it is possible to cram three siblings, multiple significant others, and an abundance of children into a medium-sized house during a cold St. Louis Christmas and never hear a single voice raised in anything but excitement over opening and playing with gifts.

At first, I approached this family closeness with caution and no small amount of suspicion. It may not speak well of me, but I have to confess that the first thing I think of when I am planning a vacation is not whether my mother would like to come along. I frankly felt a little bit pressured, as if I was expected to find the same comfort in family gatherings as Hubby.

Instead, I contorted myself into a pretzel of anguish over trying to be a family member. I mean, I knew I was, but I didn't see how that earned me the right to automatically fit in. I felt like I had to pass unspoken challenges and gather points along the way to some unknown destination, like half of a team on The Amazing Race. (My partner, sadly, had no idea we were racing anywhere, and spent our family visits basking in the midst of this game I was still learning to play, making me feel like the person who twists her ankle and grimly limps toward certain elimination.)

But eventually it dawned on me that Hubby's family weren't a bunch of judges on a reality show, but just a bunch of people who loved me because he did. And then loved me just because.

This is not an easy concept for many people to understand. You mean, families just love you? Unconditionally? In books and Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, sure, but in real life?

And then, two years ago, I got pregnant and it started to make sense in a way that does not lend itself to explanation because, frankly, there is none. I had done the unconditional love thing with my basset hound Roxanne, but an awful lot of people don't get the love-your-dog-like-your-child thing. Being pregnant with a human being put me on the same playing field as my in-laws.

Until, that is, I had The Boy and discovered the whole new web of tensions that come with a baby -- a web that seems to start and end with a new mother's hormones. Still, much as I'm willing to take the lion's share of the blame, the truth is that different understandings of what family means come rushing to the surface when there's an infant in the house.

And so I entered a whole new cycle of fretting about what Hubby's family thought of me. Did they look down on me as the first of the family to use disposable diapers? (The water, the energy of washing cloth ones!) Did they think less of me for my less than abundant milk supply? (No, more! both mother- and sister-in-law cried when they saw what I went through to avoid putting The Boy on formula in a bottle.) Surely they found me a bit selfish for preferring to calm my crying baby myself instead of passing him along so I could take a break and a nap.

By the end of each visit, my mother-in-law and I would have a drink or two together and proclaim our undying love for each other, our admiration for the other's role in my son's life, a desire to wipe the slate clean of all the normal spats that come with family. "I love you, guy!" we seemed to cry, like fraternity brothers seeped in the camaraderie of too much keg beer and a soggy yearning for some ill-defined approximation of brotherhood.

But, alas, my mother-in-law would depart and I would sober up, return to my quiet life with my small, immediate family, and panic when I saw how excited Hubby became when we began planning the next family get-together.

Until this week. When, for whatever reason, I have emerged from the fog of youthful rebellion against all things grounding, and have embraced being a 40-ish mother hosting barbeques for three generations of her family and looking an awful lot like an ad in Martha Stewart Living. I imagine all of us caught in the frame with laughs of adoring family joy as we point at The Boy gripping the chair of his cousin and putting his beaming baby face up to hers. We are soft, un-funky, lit by the easy caress of a suburban sunset, and selling something like a cheap boxed wine.

[NB: We most definitely do not live in the suburbs, but that's the point -- feeling like I'm completely myself at a family barbeque veers dangerously close to this territory.]

Many of you are aware that I've lately committed myself to another blog, http://yogamamame.blogspot.com. (Ooh, was that blatant self-promotion? Good for me -- I'm usually so terrible at it.) It consists of me mulling over a daily dilemma raised by trying to achieve personhood while dealing with motherhood in a way I find personally amusing, and then addressing the dilemma with some principles of yoga that I probably won't actually follow myself. So much easier to be the teacher than the student.

Only, it turns out, I have been teaching myself something. Because in all my writing about untangling the knots into which we tie ourselves (both mentally and physically) I seem to have straightened myself out a bit. I've let go of fretting over what my in-laws expect of me and whether they like me and whether they think Hubby made a big, huge mistake or just confounded them with an odd choice in a life partner. I stopped trying to fit in and just fit.

And so I found myself relaxing on our deck on a soft spring evening punctuated by the shrill, almost-teenager cries of my nieces, sharing parental laughter with my sisters-in-law, and granting myself a place in the tableau of what she has created spread before my mother-in-law's eyes. The wine I am drinking, by the way, is pretty cheap, but we bought it at Trader Joe's, so that makes it okay.

And therein lies the secret. I can drink cheap wine and shop at Trader Joe's. I can be a mom in her 40's and still have a kick-ass yoga practice. And I can be part of a family I want to spend time with without losing the little edges that make me me.

In fact, now that I'm looking at it from the inside, I see that this family has some pretty interesting edges itself. If you care to spend enough time with it to appreciate them.