Family Ties

So, the thing is... forget the Beaver, we should be worried about JUNE.

I recently came to the conclusion that I spent my childhood sort of embarrassed that my family was not the “Beaver Cleaver” kind of family. You know the type --handsome father and beautiful mother, plenty of money, big house in the suburbs, smart and secure kids who always had total support in every endeavor, were always dressed right and talented at the right sports. You never got the feeling, watching that show, that they ever had car trouble or had to replace their fence or have the house exterminated. It's hard to imagine a toilet overflowing at the Cleavers.

Boy, did I yearn for that kind of seamless life. I was too young to realize that appearances can be deceiving, see. So many kids I went to school with LOOKED like they were descended from the Cleavers. My mom made no bones about the fact that she considered all those conformist couples and their bland children uninteresting and vapid and the fact that I really just wanted to look and sound like everyone else was an unworthy ambition. All I wanted was to be happy in my own skin. Why COULDN'T we be more like the Cleavers?

I always felt like my family life was somehow tarnished because it was so non-traditional. There are almost no examples in my family of couples who fell in love in college, got married, worked hard at the same company for forty years, had children who grew up to have functional careers and families, and then grew old together, still madly in love. We were a fractious and raucous group growing up and then we left home and remained exactly that way but in larger numbers. I was talking about my family to a friend one time and after I ran through the various marriages, divorces, untimely deaths (and unexpected births), various stints in rehab or on unemployment or on anti-depressants, there was a long moment of silence. And then she asked could I possibly draw her a diagram?

This past weekend was the long-awaited wedding of my husband's cousin. Almost all of his entire extended family came to town, including his ninety-year-old grandmother. It was a very interesting weekend for me, because I was right there in the thick of the festivities, but because it wasn't MY family, I could be objective about the strange and delightful and sad and hysterically funny family dynamics. There were lots of textbook parent/offspring exchanges and stories told of misadventures and there was some jockeying for position, much the same as happens at high school reunions. Through it all, my husband and I would run into each other in the midst of unclogging toilets and doing wash and helping Grandma find her way back to her room and we'd hurriedly whisper the funniest thing we'd overheard and laugh and laugh --not AT anyone but just at family in general.

Because, you know, the Beaver Cleaver type of family is a MYTH! I don't know why this never dawned on me before. I don't know one single family whose members are all fully functional, productive members of society and who get along with mutual respect and a complete lack of psychotherapy. Not one. But at its best, family life is a rowdy microcosm of life itself. It's kind of like Agatha Christie's character Ms. Marple, who solves big mysteries by finding parallel situations in her tiny village. You can find examples of just about every personality and situation within your own family. The couple who made good, and the slacker with no direction, and the compulsive shopper. The peacemakers and the hell raisers; the sly and the forthright; the yuppies and the hippies and the social climbers. And each family has its own myths about its traits and genetics. My husband's family kept trying to figure out where our girls got their coloring and personalities and super brains --but of course, they completely discounted the idea that fully half of the girls’ genetics come from me and MY family. And the thing is, because it wasn't my own family and because I wasn't vacillating between annoyance and embarrassment, I thought this was simply HILARIOUS!

It made me realize how judgmental I have been of my own family, like they are some reflection on me personally, instead of just responsible for themselves. And the thing is, I really miss them. (I used to say that my family put the “fun” in “dysfunctional.”) At some point (maybe after a lot of therapy, I don't know), the families of our childhoods stop being the big influencers of our lives. We become more shaped by our own life-experiences and education and our important relationships with people to whom we are not related by blood. We no longer need the approval of our parents (ideally) so we can just appreciate them for who they are and not react to what they represent. And gosh, if everyone was like the Cleavers --sterile and buttoned up and always immaculately behaved -- at family gatherings, there'd be no funny stories of the time(s) Grandma drove her car into the bank building or the time the bride choked another cousin until he turned blue.

It was a great weekend. And, maybe, a little heartbreaking. It made me a little sad for all the time I have wasted, passing judgment on my family instead of just loving them. Why was I so threatened by our differences? There was so much good-natured acceptance of everyone this weekend. At one point, everybody, I mean EVERYBODY, borrowed bathing suits and shorts and got in the hot tub. It was pretty wonderful --nobody sucking in his/her stomach or worrying about not having shaven legs. And then we got dressed up for the wedding and I have to say, everyone cleaned up mighty well.

This holiday season, I resolve to spend the time with my own family just enjoying them for the loud and hilarious group they are. Basking in their total acceptance of me, and their certainty that my children are the brightest stars in the Universe. I think I've gotten to a point, finally, where I can stop worrying about how they manage their money and careers and mental health. I love them a lot and I want to concentrate on loving them AS THEY ARE.

And maybe once we accept where we came from, we realize we don't have to stay there, you know? We can appreciate it and we can move on to create a different sort of reality for our own children --a reality that will certainly be chock full of embarrassing moments called, hello, LIFE. We're human. We're not the Cleavers and guess what? It's OKAY for our kids to see us being REAL. So when Ana tells me to turn off my Keb Mo' CD because she “just can’t take it anymore” and I realize that she's repeating words I once said to her when she was squeaking a toy in the close confines of our car, I'm going to give myself a break. So it was a “less than June Cleaver” parenting moment. It was an honest one.

Plus, maybe we SHOULD be worried about the Beav. I bet his perfect childhood and perfect family never prepared him for anything in the real world. Then again, maybe Ward has a ne'er-do-well brother with a penchant for strong whiskey and chorus girls with weak virtue. He might even be a bit embarrassed about it.

But that's family --for better or for worse, they're OURS. This weekend, when my husband told me that he had just overheard his aunt asking the newlywed couple if they were having problems yet, we laughed, but lovingly. And when the bride tearfully thanked us for all we did to make this weekend go smoothly, I said, “It's family that makes us know we are blessed.”

That, and the fact that none of us ever has to vacuum in high heels and a pearl necklace.

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (3.5) and Jane (13 months). She lives in Austin, Texas and she has GREATLY exaggerated the neuroses of both her family and her husband's in this column.