Family, Again

I think I must have been switched at birth. Somewhere, I truly hope, there is a 35-year-old woman who looks just like me, who was switched into a family where 80% of the members DON'T have their heads up their ass.

My cousins are in town, along with their parents--my mom's youngest sis and her husband. These are the relatives on Mom's side that I CAN deal with. I haven't seen one of these cousins in maybe ten years; the other I haven't seen since I was 15. So needless to say, I kinda wanted to see them. Generally when my aunt and uncle are in town, all the sibs go out to dinner together, along with whichever ones of the cousins want to join in. The presence of Auntie Cyn, Uncle Bill, and their spawn pretty much made my RSVP a guaranteed "hell no", so for about ten years now I've just been out of the family loop entirely. I've had no problem with that, but then again Lara and Linnea haven't been in town for about that long either.

So when Mom told me they were coming to town and everyone was going to dinner, I said to her "If Auntie Cyn and her crew weren't coming, I'd consider showing up." Whereupon she informed me that if that was indeed the case, then I was in luck; none of them would be there, just the out-of-towners and Uncle Dave and Aunt Linda (who I also mostly can't deal with, but who are much less odious than Cyn and Bill).

This was a few weeks ago, when this conversation took place, and I didn't even know I'd be off today, but I still agreed to meet them all for pizza at 6. I put on a blouse and jeans, not too dressy but still pretty-ish (I thought), and left the house at 3:30. Between the buses and the traffic, it was 5:30 before I made it out to the end of the line, where Mom picks me up.

I knew what I was up against the minute I got into the car. "So listen," my mother said. "Since last time Uncle Dave asked, I told him point-blank that you were still living in Edgewater in your old apartment..."

"Already thought of it," I told her.

"Well, it's just that anything that Dave and Linda find out will get back to Cyn and Bill, and I'm supposed to go to the twins' confirmation next weekend, and if they find out it will just be...you know, the inquisition..."

"Yeah, I know."

"I thought you were gonna get dressed up," she said. "You know...slacks or a skirt or something other than jeans..."

"Mom. It's pizza. It's not formal dining."

"Well, I just want you to look as nice as possible..." (For the record, I DID look nice. Even in jeans. In fact, I got more approving looks from the male population along the bus route than I've gotten in a long time.)

We had gotten back to the house by this time. "Are you wearing your hair like that?" she asked.

"No, I'm going to brush it. I know I look like a rats' nest....the bus windows were open and... "

"Aren't you going to pull it back?"

"No, I like it like this. If I pull it back it makes my head look big."

"Here. Put on some lipstick."

"Mom...."

"Well, I just want you to look nice."

So I gave in, slightly; I put on lipstick, then blotted most of it off. And once again, my mother displayed her uncanny knack of making everything, at all times, all about her. "Do you do this just to annoy me?" she said.

"No."

"Well it seems like it. It seems like anything I say, you have to do just the opposite, just to upset me."

"In this case? It's not about you," I said.

"What is it about, then?" she asked.

"It's about me! I'm not trying to impress anyone; I don't feel a need to be phony about who I am just because some people in your family might judge me and report to the rest of them. I'm not going to be fake about it."

"I'm not asking you to be fake..."

"Yeah, you sort of are."

And of course she got all silent and pissy, and threw in a few cracks about how bad she thought my hair looked (It SO doesn't!), and somehow we made it to the restaurant, where everyone hugged me and was glad to see me, and where I gave the party-line Edgewater address when they asked where I was living (though by the way Uncle Bill reacted to that answer, I'm pretty sure he knows it's a lie, and probably has my actual 'hood-based address. Which would be hilarious, if you ask me...my mother has been SO worried that they'll find out where I'm living, ever since I moved in here. You'd think I was living in a brothel or something.) And after dinner, everyone came back to Mom's for dessert, and as I was setting up plates for Mom as she sliced the cake, Aunt Jenn told me how pretty she thought my hair was. I managed not to gloat....much.

During dessert, Uncle Dave managed to cement his status as Yep, Still A Racist Asshole with the following speech: "So Jason (his son) took the boys over to the old neighborhood, to show them where Mom and Dad used to live...I chewed him out for it afterwards. It's horrible over there, really bad. I told him not to make that kind of mistake again, and he said even HE regretted it once he got into that neighborhood...."

"That neighborhood"--need I further explain?--is predominantly black. Nevermind that his estimations of the area's dangers are wildly overblown; nevermind that there's also a legendarily-racist cadre of white folks living over there, which probably makes the neighborhood more dangerous for the black people than for the whites. Nope...there are Scary Black People there, and therefore it is too dangerous for a 40-year-old man and two 17-year-old boys to drive through. And then he and Auntie Linda went into some ridiculousness about something that someone's friend's sister's hairdresser's cousin had told them, about how if you go down a certain street "THEY" will block you in at one end, then come up behind you and rob you and...I had tuned out by this point, because it was easier to focus on picking up cake crumbs with the back of my fork than it was to focus on NOT ripping these racist idiots a new orifice or two. That was as close as I came to blowing the whole Edgewater/no-boyfriend story completely off the map...I must really love my mother, you know?

At least I got to see Lara and Linnea...who seemed a little less-than-impressed with Uncle Dave's yatterings, as well. I always knew there was a reason I liked those two.