The ugliness of family dinners and holidays will always be there. The old saying is true, you can’t pick your family, but you can pick your friends.
While you can choose who you will have for your partner in life, and too many people make the wrong choice for the wrong reasons, you cannot choose who your parents are. You can’t choose your siblings, your cousins, or your aunts and uncles and all those other relatives.
Of course we sometimes make poor decisions in choosing our friends too, but that’s much easier to fix.
But can you choose who you associate with?
The pressure is on from the beginning and from all sides.
Family is family. You are supposed to have that family bond. It is supposed to be stronger than anything, unbreakable, and always there to fall back on as a safety net.
Anyone with a less than perfect family knows that isn’t the reality, it’s an ideal pushed on us all.
The reality is that sometimes family are the most rude, and who you most want to not associate with.
But the pressure is on. It’s a holiday dinner and you are expected by family and society to show up and pretend to like each other whether you do or not.
That pressure brings together people who really shouldn’t be together, who’d rather be somewhere else like maybe getting a root canal without freezing or pain medication.
That pressure makes people grumpy, cranky, and downright ornery.
It brings out the best and the worst in people.
People fight about stupid things that really don’t matter.
They get nasty for no good reason on people who probably don’t deserve it.
In my family these dinners are best gotten over quickly.
I warn the kids repeatedly before going, on the way there, and as we arrive to stay away from certain family members. Don’t talk to them, don’t try to play with them, and don’t ask them anything. Just stay away from them.
I must spend the entire time there keeping myself between my kids and adult family members, running constant interference, protecting my kids from nasty verbal attacks they don’t deserve, as well as dealing with them when they do but the adult will go way overboard beyond what is acceptable.
Luckily my kids have developed a thick skin early on. I protect them enough, but not so much they don’t know how to deal in a bad situation.
They face the threat of frighteningly loud and fierce verbal attacks from an uncle over things his kid may have done, not them. But in his defence his kid is entirely perfect and does no wrong so if someone broke Grandma’s ornament it has to be my kid, whether she was even in the room when it happened or not.
Of course I am being facetious here.
My issues: 1. Find out who did it before you freak out on my kid. 2. If she deserves it, give her a reasonable scolding. A large adult towering over a small child, spittle flying in her face as you bellow like an idiot in her face, plates rattling in the cupboards and walls vibrating from the volume, and scaring the crap out of her is not reasonable.
And then in that moment when you let your guard down your kid makes a terrible mistake and tries to talk to or play with the wrong uncle.
A fifty year old man telling a small child to “Go bother someone who likes you” in a nasty tone of voice is just plain wrong in my book.
But I am supposed to blame the child. She was wrong.
Although, I do have to ask myself how a small child is supposed to understand. She goes to one house one day and the uncles there treat her with respect and courtesy even if they are getting annoyed with her. They scold in a reasonable tone and only if she deserves it.
Then she goes to the other house the next day where a different set of uncles are mean, nasty, and completely unacceptably rude and volatile towards a small child.
Then again I suppose it is her fault, after all she does have two strikes against her even before she walks in door #2. First, she’s a child, and second she’s the wrong person’s child – mine instead of the favorite son’s.
And so with Thanksgiving dinner over and Christmas soon to follow we can sit back and ponder the very wise words of a small child:
After a little heartbroken sobbing and a few “I thought he liked me”s,
this little girl pulls herself together better than most adults I’ve seen, turns to me very seriously and says,
“Why does he even have to be my uncle?”
And then she says softly,
“I just wish he could be nicer.”
I wish I knew, kid, I wish I knew. And yes, I wish he could be nicer too.
