We’re a Happy Family— Ramones
#365Songs: August 11th
We’re a happy family we’re a happy
family we’re a happy family
There’s nothing quite like a traditional wedding to bury old wounds.
Is bury the right word? Repress, avoid, passive-aggressively set aside, perhaps even temporarily heal? Unlike other family occasions, which are far more intimate, a wedding is too chaotic, too large, and too organized for tensions to rise on a grand scale.
On the dysfunction spectrum, my family sits somewhere between Roseanne’s Connors and Six Feet Under’s Fishers, but not quite on par with the Bear’s traumatic Fishes season two episode. The generational trauma is burrowed under the surface, perpetually unaddressed, played out through volatile political debates and — my go to move — periods of disappearance. When my Mom was alive, she was the peacemaker, a woman who centered her entire life around keeping family together — even when perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be. Without a peacemaker, the unspoken treaties fell fast.
We’re a happy family we’re a happy
family we’re a happy family me mom and daddy
We’re a happy family we’re a happy
family we’re a happy family me mom and daddy
Perhaps politics has always torn families apart, but it’s safe to say it’s never been quite this stark. Political leanings have become ideologies. A lawn sign says more about a person than ever before, as it’s not just a statement about what you believe you deserve but also about who gets included or excluded from those expectations—in some instances, who gets to exist at all. A vote for Trump is a vote against anyone who is queer, non-white, non-male, and anti-Fascist. To vote for Trump is to normalize bigotry and bullying, a push back to pre-Civil Rights America.
And that’s the thing about my family. They yearn for the 1950’s nuclear family structure, back when public displays of values, traditions, and religiosity were communal experiences. What I’ve come to realize over the years — as family members pass on, and secret lives get unearthed — is that nothing was better back then. It’s just that everyone buried their inner truths and masked their deepest vulnerabilities. Nobody can process anything when every trauma is buried, repressed, and unprocessed. While the conservative’s battle against social progress, liberated lifestyles, and “wokeness” is unquestionably rooted in fear of losing white privilege and patriarchal superiority, it’s also the safest place to hide. Bullies are always the most insecure, the most confused amongst us, a defense mechanism that causes them to attack others for the parts of themselves they’re too afraid to acknowledge.
Perhaps the greatest antidote to the MAGA movement is weekly psychotherapy.
To quote drunk game show host and pedophile Jimmy Gator from Paul Thomas Anderson’s opus, Magnolia: “We might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”
Siting here in Queens eating refried beans we’re in all the magazines
Gulpin’ down thorazines we ain’t got no friends our troubles never end
No Christmas cards to send daddy likes
men daddy’s telling lies baby’s eating flies
Mommy’s on pills baby’s got the chills I’m friends with the President
I’m friends with the Pope we’re all
making a fortune selling Daddy’s dope
Connection was the original promise of social media, and for a while it worked. Old friends reunited and families shared photos, a powerful way to understand each other better. And to some extent, it worked so well that it taught us the difference between those of us with imperfect lives, those who pretended their lives were perfect, and those who judged everyone else without ever revealing a true thing about themselves. Over time, our individual and familial facades fell away, leaving old wounds and new scars, all while revealing how we each feel about issues previously left unsaid.
And that gets me back to the wedding. I went “home” last week for the second time in eight years, a destination that has gotten more complex in a post-Mom Trump’ian world. I’ve severed ties, disappeared, and avoided family events to protect myself against threatening and selfish ideologies. So many relationships paused on the worst things we’ve ever said to one another.
Even as I age, I continue to grow and evolve. And as I understand myself more and more, as I unmask and embrace my identity, I refuse to perform for others at my own expense. To leave a place and not return for many years reveals a unique vantage point: to see how little that place has changed in contrast to how different I’ve become. A wedding, in my family at least, is a journey back in time: the same people in the same place doing the same thing, just as older versions of themselves. And yet, despite my anxiety and disorientation, there was something comforting in the predictability, in the warm embraces of those I feel at odds with, in the concept of being loved but not liked. For a night, at least, I accepted the comfort of being seen — even if not known — in a place that reminded me of a place I once called home.
For the couple getting married, a wedding is a beginning, a blurring of two dysfunctional families into one. For those of us in attendance, a wedding is an opportunity to acknowledge our shared histories, bury differences in whiskey, and be kind to those we may never see again.
Siting here in Queens eating refried beans we’re in all the magazines
Gulpin’ down thorazines we ain’t got no friends our troubles never end
No Christmas cards to send daddy likes men
We’re a happy family we’re a happy
family we’re a happy family me mom and daddy
(REPEAT TO END: We’re a happy family…
~
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