No principles today.
Image by anyjazz65 via Flickr
Today is a day for introspection and not timeless truths. The only timeless truths here at RCB are borrowed from somewhere else anyway. I don’t pretend to have life changing insights and original thinking. Life isn’t about being original anyway. It is about making the best use of your resources and focusing on what is important. I’m being philosophical today coming off a very strange Thanksgiving Day and I’m trying to make something good out of it.
We struggled this Thanksgiving. Getting the entire family together this year was difficult with one son in LA and the other a slave of commerce. Our LA son drove up but our local son had to work Thanksgiving Day so we had Thanksgiving on Tuesday night. Talk about crazy-making. On Thursday we watched football and ate leftovers with the LA son. Today, he is driving back home and it is all back to normal with just me and my wife to finish the leftovers.
Not Norman Rockwell but not Ozzie Osbourne either
At our house, It wasn’t the picture perfect Normal Rockwell Thanksgiving. But then we aren’t the picture perfect Norman Rockwell family either. Life is messy. Families are complicated. Interpersonal relationships are tinged with dark overtones and human weakness. We try our best but it doesn’t always come out warm and wonderful, especially when your models are from the media and not real life.
Even under the best circumstances,Thanksgiving is difficult to handle. There are just too many expectations and too many visions about how it is supposed to be. Families are supposed to warm, loving and supportive and Thanksgiving is when it all gets displayed. TV and news always features the warm and wonderful family stories about great fathers and extraordinary sons. Thanksgiving day was full of stories about the picture perfect Harbaugh family with those two football coach brothers. Then I look around the Carlson manse. It is enough to make a person sick.
Is it time to give up?
It all leaves me feeling quite empty. Our family just doesn’t measure up to the image and it is probably all my fault. We fuss. Sometimes we’re downright nasty. It’s natural to wonder what’s wrong with u and why we can’t be like we see on TV. .So that’s where my thinking is on Black Friday, feeling sorry for myself that I don’t have the perfect family. What did I do wrong?
But wait a minute!
But after a time there came a wake up moment. I stopped beating myself up and changed my perspective. It’s true that I’m not perfect and our family has it’s shortcomings as well but how bad are we really? And how many flaws have been covered up for those perfect families on TV. Aren’t they ever human and petty? I know my own flaws intimately and I experience the dysfunctional aspects of my family on a regular basis. It’s not easy to ignore them. On the other hand, I know very little about the apparently perfect people praised in the media. They look good from afar but they might be different up close and personal. They might be real people like us when you dig deeper.
So now that I’ve worked through my feelings of inadequacy, I’m feeling better about myself and my family. We aren’t perfect but then we never claimed to be. Nobody is ever going to feel let down after getting to know me better. I never wanted to star on TV anyway. I’m as good as I can be and trying each day to be better. And that is really what is important in life.
The house is all hot and steamy from the turkey roasting all day and potatoes boiling steam into the air….then someone opens a window and a wonderful cool breeze blows in. That is what your post feels like today. You are a breath of fresh air in the stuffy holiday season. These big holidays have gotten to be less and less fun for us each year for all the reasons you mentioned. We are gently trying to simplify and reduce expectations without getting anyone “mad” at us. Maybe its age, I don’t know. Families change, people have died, divorced, moved. It seems that we keep trying to recreate our childhood memories of holidays and can’t…or maybe our memories have been distorted by all the media images of what families are “supposed” to be. I don’t know. Let’s all just do what works for our particular situations and shut out the media versions of family life. I’m getting grumpy early this year…holidays do that to me. Thanks for the dose of reality…makes me feel better.
JaneO,
I really appreciate your comment because I debated with myself about posting it. It all seemed so negative. Finally I decided that I would do it. Thanks for the encouragement that the not so perfect families doing their best are ok. Maybe even better than ok. Happy Holidays.
Our son went to his bride’s uncle-northwest coast. Our daughter gathered with the four Marine families that they have served with for five years-on the east coast. My sister had mom over to her son’s house, leaving a brother with no one to eat with in the southwest. My sil served dinner on three days to accommodate work schedules and divorced kids in Nevada.
We served, and then ate with, the three hundred hungry, elderly and homeless in our adopted midwest community of 20,000.
We will celebrate our Thanksgiving in…March with most of the family at a wedding and then a anniversary party.
It was a bit tough this year- but we will survive it. And I think our family is pretty neat. They are our family after all.
Jan,
Maybe it wasn’t the picture perfect Thanksgiving for your family but it sounds like a lot of love and giving spread over the country. As you say, your family is special just like every other family. Happy Thanksgiving all year long.
Family members are supposed to be loving, warm and supportive but I think our expectations that are our true values are much higher. So when our expectations are “broken” – we fall a lot harder.
Willtowonder,
I think maybe we are harder on our families (and ourselves) than we are to strangers. Maybe we should expect more but maybe we should be more willing to forgive as well.
There’s no such ting as the perfect family. Yours sounds fairly normal to me.
Hansi’s last Blog Post ..New Zealand
Hansi,
You may be right.