Sans Fig Leaf
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"Remember all through our lives"
7 December, 2006
I see him on the bus a few times a month: the Rash Man. I first remember him from about a year ago when he was sitting on the bus talking on his cell phone. As cell phone users in public places often do, he was talking very loudly. Even with my headphones on playing rather loudly in my vain attempt to drown him out, I could hear in sickening detail his description of a rash he had on various parts of his body.
In the rest of his life he may be a witty, charming, intelligent man, but I will forever think of him as the Rash Man. Whenever I see him I don't just remember the overheard conversation, but I also experience again the embarassment, awkwardness, and disgust of that first impression.
I was reminded of this during some other conversations recently. They are a type of conversation I run into a lot during the holidays: people describing how horrible their family is, or how awful their childhood was, or what an ordeal the holidays with family will be. Frequently these stories are accompanied with a lament along the lines of: "and my mother treats me like a ten-year-old" or "my brother still thinks I'm a clueless kid following in his shadow," or "my dad grills my like a teen-aged screw-up about to get expelled."
I symphatize. For years I felt that many of my relatives still saw me as an impoverished student play-acting at adulthood. It didn't matter that I'd left university, held down a full-time job for years, et cetera. Everything about my life was referred to as temporary. Where I lived wasn't my home, it was "the place you're staying now," for example.
I held this against them, of course. How dare they discount me that way? Couldn't they see how much I had accomplished? Were they blind or just willfully ignorant?
I was forced to reassess this evaluation by a conversation with my youngest sister. She's a half-sister and sixteen years younger than I am, so we didn't grow up together--but I always had the notion that we had a good relationship.
During one of the rare phone conversations with my dad, he put her on the phone and we chatted a bit. I believe she was enrolled in community college at the time and telling me about what classes she was taking. For some reason, I made a joke about her obsession with unicorns. She, somewhat coldly, replied, "I outgrew the unicorn phase years ago, you know."
That's when it hit me: I had become one of Them--the irritating relatives who don't realize you've grown up. The image I had of her (and our relationship) was built up from a few memories I had of her early childhood, and the occasional contact in the intervening years. It was a terribly incomplete and inaccurate image.
Part of it is simple human nature. We spend years in a particular relationship with someone, and we always see them from that perspective. When our family members see us, they remember what we were like, and they experience the same feelings of affection, exasperation, worry, and hope, that we evoked over the years interacting with them. Just as whenever I see the Rash Man I recall the conversation and I feel the same emotions again.
In some cases we exacerbate the problem by our very avoidance of it. See, those family members have years and years worth of memories of their experiences with us. Those memories come complete with a host of emotions and meaning. All those memories and emotions add up to their image of who we are.
If we've spent much of our adult life minimizing time with our family, then they don't have new memories to add to or modify that old image. It doesn't matter how many times they've been told about what we do with our lifes. Being told doesn't have the same power as experiencing something firsthand.
For example, no matter how much detail I told my grandmother about my home--be it the new furniture I bought, or my rose bushes, or the water heater that needed replacing--it wasn't real to her until she finally came to visit. As it was, the visit was a bit surreal. She expressed amazement over and over again at the most basic amenities of the house. It reached a point were I was expecting her to start waxing eloquent at the fact that the doors were all equipped with doorknobs. Apparently she had pictured me living in some squalid studio apartment in a decaying tenement furnished with dumpster-diver furniture. Or maybe just a version of my teen-age bedroom.
After that visit I noticed one specific change in the way my grandmother talked to me. She stopped referring to my mother's place as my home while referring to Seattle as if it were a place I was just visiting. Instead of, "Do you have to go back to Seattle so soon?" it became "I guess you need to get back home." While "You should spend more time at home with your mother" became "I know your mother is looking forward to you visiting her place this holiday!"
It hasn't wrought a complete change. My grandmother still doesn't really understand what I do for a living, she's always asking me questions about people I haven't seen in decades, or activities I haven't been involved with in just as long. But we can't have everything.
Once I realized that I bore some of the blame for their lack of knowledge of my life, I stopped acting quite so defensive around them. I also admitted to myself that my perceptions of them were at least as inaccurate (or incomplete) as their perceptions of me, and I tried to act accordingly. I wasn't bristling at so many questions and comments. They weren't being irritated by as many of my questions or comments.
It went a long way toward reducing tensions all around. Which is a good thing, because I really don't want to be the Rash Man of my family.
--Henry David Thoreau
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