This last weekend I did not actually roll the dice. Instead I went back home to California to visit my nephew for the first time. He is fantastic. He is adorable. Most importantly, he loves me. This is him with Banana protecting him while he is napping.

Going home usually makes me anxious and excited at the same time. I don’t know what it is about home and family, but a lot of the time I am actually hesitant to talk to them and see them. But every time I am with them I am very excited to be there and couldn’t be happier. I don’t know why, but it bothers me.

That being said, I love the baby. It was so amazing to hold him and realize that I was a little bit responsible for this little things life moving forward. Odds are good I won’t see him much and I will miss much of his life while he grows up, but I am determined to do what I can to make sure he has a fulfilling and happy life.

Note: Dear Reader, this is about to get really angry and a little depressing. Fair warning.

Family

One thing that I realized, is that as I write this blog I end up taking a lot of the sayings that people casually throw around and trying to understand their application in my life. I would hazard to say that many of the quotes that people throw around are not fully considered prior to regurgitation.

There are so, so many quotes that people love repeating when it comes to their family. They all have the same basic theme and meaning, but with very subtle differences. Most of them talk about belonging, and blood being stronger than friendship, and all that other good, squishy stuff that people like to believe about their family.

For me, I typically have a hard time reconciling a lot of these sayings with my family. I have the luxury of belonging to a giant family. My mother is the youngest of 10, which means that I am number 21 of 23 cousins. Now that we are all older and my cousins are popping out kids, there are something like 21 little kids/babies running around. This also does not include the friends that are basically family and their kids, nor does it include anyone on my dad’s side of the family. Basically, if I was to get married right now, I would be obligated to invite over 100+ people before I could even think about which friends I wanted to invite. (Good thing I don’t have that many friends, haw haw haw.)

Anyways, I love my family – immediate and extended. Blood is blood, and I like to believe that I will always be on the side of blood. I would not be the person I am today without my family.

However, family is also probably the most damaging thing to deal with. My parents are divorced, and let’s just say that it did not go well. It was much uglier than Her and my “divorce” in which I took sole custody of the dog and she took sole custody of the chinchilla with reciprocal visiting rights.

I finally had the chance to really talk to both of my parents about the divorce recently. My mother over the weekend, and my father when he came to visit me in New York a few months back. As is pretty typical for me, both conversations were pretty fucking raw and brutally honest. I am almost positive that my relationship with my father is in shambles and I am kind of at a loss as to whether or not it is salvageable. I probably said some unforgivably hurtful things to my mother in the course of trying to explain my views on a situation to her. I am deeply hurt by having said some of the things that I said to both of them, but they are things that I am absolutely positive needed to be said and heard by both sides.

The major realization that I had while I was talking to my mother is that interactions within a family are largely unfair. I was brought up with the very basic understanding that if there is a person in the family, and they are older, everything they say is fucking gospel and it is my duty to honor them. This applies to everything from being expected to pour the tea for family at the dinner table because you’re the youngest, to accepting their ‘advice’ on friends and significant others, to career paths and schools, to my mom trying to give me a curfew this last weekend. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter and I am happy to acquiesce to their requests, but there are some choices and decisions that are made that a person should be allowed to make without input from other people if they don’t want it. There are situations where more important things need to be considered than immediate obedience and deference to the parents. I think the children need to acknowledge that and, most importantly, I think the parents need to acknowledge that.

Some things I do not think will ever change. They have lasted the test of time and will constantly be a point of contention. Choice of spouse. How to raise kids. Career path. Education levels. Investment and savings strategies. As I write out that list, the understanding of the privilege I have been privy to kind of slaps me in the face. That is a topic for another time. Maybe.

Anyways, this kind of brings me to what has really been bugging me recently. Some things in life should transcend individual needs and should be focused on the actual event at hand. Weddings. Funerals. Grandchildren. Graduations. Basically any major life milestone that happens only once or twice in an individual’s life. As far as I am concerned, you are fucking required to put aside all differences you may or may not have with guests/relatives at these events and make happy for one fucking day. You are not allowed to bring in your agenda to make it uncomfortable for the person that’s celebrating. You are never allowed to make the person celebrating feel guilty about celebrating.

I am a firm believer that at many points in everyone’s lives, you are required to learn to compromise and to act in a manner that is not in your best interest. You are required to learn to sacrifice for the benefit of someone else. You don’t have to sacrifice everything, and you don’t have to do it all the time. But you need to recognize when things are more important or larger than you as an individual, your self-worth, and your ego.

The problem that I see with this is not that people don’t do it, but many times they do it for the wrong things at the wrong times. To me, there is nothing wrong with compromising. It is a skill that is being squeezed out of our society to the detriment of everyone in it. True compromise should not have strings attached. True sacrifice should not come with a disclaimer that the ‘favor’ will be repaid in the future. In most scenarios, I would hazard to say that no one is actually compromising or making sacrifices. They are always just doing each other favors of different magnitudes. I can understand that favors should be repaid (which again is a completely different story which I personally believe contributes to the disaster that is our capitalist society), but they are not compromises or sacrifices.

The problem is that with family, everything is a sacrifice. Everything is a compromise. I watched Interstellar the other day, ironically with some family, and there was a line in it that resonated with me quite a bit. There is a point where the father is talking to the daughter (and apparently every fucking blogger in the universe talks about this quote) and he says to her that “[Parents] become their children’s memories.” My interpretation of the quote is basically the same as everyone else’s. As a parent you are going to die eventually and your entire existence will be remembered through your children. Every action you take moving forward as a parent will be burned into your child’s memory forever. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet, but there it is. From everything that I have experienced and seen in life, I suppose that can be said to be true. My mother has sacrificed quite a bit to get me and my sister to be where we are. She continues to sacrifice on a personal, emotional and monetary level to try to help us succeed.

The issue is that so much of how I was raised was based on the concepts of fairness and repayment. How can you repay that? How can you repay someone who has sacrificed their entire life to make you succeed? The really simple answer is you can’t. My mom still jokes about a promise I made to her when I was really little about how I was going to buy her a beach front house when I was rich because of all the things she did for me and my sister. That has evolved to include emerald rings, fire diamonds and most recently a Tesla Model S as my career has progressed. Good luck me. But even then, it wouldn’t be enough.

So when you think about all of the things that she and arguably my dad (and relevant step-parents to a much smaller extent) have given up, is it wrong for me or my sister to be upset with them when we focus something entirely on ourselves? Maybe it is selfish of us, but a lot of the time it feels like we end up missing out on enjoying the largest milestones of our lives because we are trying to juggle the family factions and make everyone happy in an environment where any slight, no matter how big or small, can be blown completely out of proportion. And this is what I ended up talking to my mother about, mostly brought up because of a letter that my father wrote my sister.

I don’t want to get into specifics, but it basically boils down to the adequacy in how each parent viewed my sister’s ability to successfully juggle the two divorced families when they were in town to celebrate the fact that my sister had the first grandchild and she was having him blessed. Let me re-iterate. SHE HAD THE FIRST GRANDCHILD AND THEY WERE THERE TO CELEBRATE THE LITTLE BABY’S BLESSING. This is basically the worst time anyone could ever choose to fight over anything dealing with my sister. You show up, you celebrate the baby, you go on your way. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. The only solution to the problem is to make sure that everyone is equally pissed off and no one is happy. This is what happens. Every time. And it’s fucking bullshit. Do I think maybe she could have handled it better (given I don’t know all the details), sure. But if it is anything like any of the other events that we have tried to celebrate, there basically is no win. There is never even a chance of a win.

Maybe I have a very skewed view on things. Maybe the relationship I have with my parents dictates a lot of the inherent feelings I have when I deal with them. Maybe the culture of deference that I was raised in makes me feel responsible for managing my parent’s emotions more than I should. Who knows, it doesn’t really matter. After 32 years, my views on family and responsibility are probably not going to change.

I have taken a path with my parents that I am neither terribly happy with, but am also not terribly upset about. At some point in everyone’s lives, you need to make a conscious decision as to who matters in your life. Whether it is your friends or family, some people are going to have a large impact on you no matter what. If you are a cold-hearted and brutally rational person like me, sometimes you are allowed to choose who matters and who has an impact on your life. I have made the decision that one of my parent’s actions will have a very minimal impact on me, and that the other one’s will. I feel terrible about making this decision. It hurts me every single time I see anything to do with happy families and parenting. It hurts me to watch movies that have parent/child relationships. But I made the decision because it hurt too much the other way as well.

Wrapping up

So that was long and a little depressing. If you are reading this, you are officially privy to more of my internal dialogue than basically 90% of the people that I talk to. Maybe even 95%. Feel special. Don’t get me wrong, I love my family. My immediate family is amazing and I feel like so many of my cousins are basically just extensions of my immediate family. Even with all the drama that comes with such a large family, I would never, ever wish to have anything different.

On a much happier note, here is another picture of the baby sleeping on me. He makes me happy. I love him because he reminds me of what my family means to me and why it is so important to have a good, strong family.

Love your family. Give everything you have to making it work, because once you break from a part of your family. It really won’t ever come back.