Skip to main content

Did you grow up in a normal family?

Rare personal post coming, apologies in advance.

Pointing to the jumble of clothes in our hot press my daughter complained that we don't fold our clothes "like normal families do". That simple grumble triggered a knee jerk fear reaction in me.

My kids are embarking upon that great adventure in life called "The Teenage Years" and it scares me silly. It scares me because we have had so much fun and closeness during the preteen years and I know that that closeness is probably going to loosen a bit as my kids forge their own adult lives and personalities. I am going to miss that closeness so much. It scares me because of all the big bad nasties that the world has in store for young folk growing up even though I think we have done a pretty good job of preparing them. Most of all though it scares me because I remember my own teenage years as a dark and confusing time of disillusionment, loneliness and self doubt. I really don't want them to experience the same.  To be honest it took me about a decade to recover from my own teenage years. Looking back on it a lot of my angst seems silly to me now but at at the time I worried about many things which really didn't needs worrying about at all.

One of worries that constantly plagued me was that my family wasn't normal and that somehow I wasn't normal either. There were difficulties in my family but there was also a lot of love and there was a bunch of people doing their best to cope with the circumstances life threw at them. If that isn't normal, then I don't know what is. Unfortunately as a teenager I couldn't see beyond the saccharine stereotype of a perfect family living in contented domestic bliss. Even when later I began to come across folks facing much more serious challenges than we did it took me a long time to accept that we hadn't done so badly after all. I was a pretty smart kid in terms of book learning but for some reason I have always been slow to pick up on life's more fundamental lessons like that.

Perhaps I am being paranoid. Perhaps my daughters comment was no more than a passing grumble (our hot press is pretty shocking really). On the other hand she does share a lot of my genes. How can I convince her that there is room in life for all kinds of people and all kinds of families. There is room for people with messy hot presses and room for people with maniacally tidy hot presses. There is room for people who have their first serious boyfriend at 15 and there is room for people who have their first serious boyfriend at 50. There is room for people who like sport and room for people who like music and room for people who like studying. There is even room for people who like sport and music and studying. There are lots of tough things in life but the difference between people is not a tough thing it is a wonderful thing. Can a teenager understand that?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Somewhat normal. At least that was what I thought, up until a few years ago.

About twenty years ago I moved to another country (just me) and my big sister didn't take it very well (she was later diagnosed as bipolar w/ chronic depression). Several years later my father died and big sis really didn't take that very well.

A couple of years ago I got a phone call from my big sis. She told me that for several years while we were growing up, Dad had sexually abused her. Big sis said she'd told mom that it was happening but mom never believed her, not until years later when dad apparently finally admitted it.

I knew my big sis's bipolar and anti-depression medication sometimes messed up her head, and while my little sis would have confirmed what big sis told me, I never spoke to little sis about it. Not because I didn't want to know, but because I recalled things Dad used to say and do during our childhood. Things that when I looked back on them, in that context, meant my big sis was probably telling the truth.

My father sexually abused my sister while we were growing up and I had no idea. Which was probably for the better or I would not have survived high school. I would have confronted Dad and he would have killed me. Seriously. Killed, as in dead.

If your childhood seems pretty normal now, you're welcome.
mbp said…
Thank you for your comment @anonymous. I can only imagine how deeply distressing this must have been for you to learn of adulthood and I do hope the passage of time makes this less painful for you and your sisters to remember.

Serious things do happen in families and the things that happen in our families impact upon us very deeply for a very long time. In my post I trivialised the differences between families but of course the truth is that many many families have to deal with with very serious issues like serious illness, bereavement, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental health issues, abuse, infidelity extreme poverty and so on.

However my point still holds. Just because you have these problems does not mean your family is not normal and it sure as hell doesn't mean you are not normal. Very many normal families have very real problems and normal people have deal with these problems the best way they can.

I don't know if you are old enough to remember the Waltons TV show? I get angry now thinking about it and similar shows which portrayed a wholesome image of "normal" family life in which simple goodness always triumphs in the end. Real life isn't like that unfortunately. Then again maybe maybe it is not so unfortunate. Maybe all this messy complicated jumble is what life is really all about and maybe dealing with this mess is really living. Maybe instead of feeling guilty about the things we did and didn't do as a teenager we can feel proud to have just survived and continue to feel proud as we keep on surviving each and every day.
Anonymous said…
Aah, the Waltons. What a strange twist of fate that you should bring them up, mbp. I guess I cannot be truly anonymous any longer. My name is John, and when I was young and going to bed my father would frequently call out "Good night, John boy," and I of course responded, "Good night, Pa."

When I returned home to bury my father, as I stood over his grave, I said one last, very tearful, "Good night, Pa."

I don't think any family is normal. There is no "average" family. We all have problems of one kind or another. Not folding your clothes, or eating a Sunday roast, or having a weekly family Games Night doesn't mean you're not normal, nor does doing those things make you a "normal family".

Nobody is normal. We just are. Are, in the existential sense.

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p