Familydrama

Subtitle: Sven's Vicarious Adventure Revisited

Or: Got Issues?

A friend's comment over dinner the other night hit me right between the chakras. She remarked how envious she is when I describe my occasional evening indulgence in a quiet meal along with a book and a drink and suitable music. I understand where she's coming from, a thirtysomething mother with a five-year-old and a six-month-old, a demanding job, a husband, and a house to manage. To hear me tell it, I'm living the life of Riley, slipping into my smoking jacket and settling into an evening of aesthetic pleasures undisturbed by the needs of others.

And she's right, up to a point. Most of the time when I get home at night I have nobody's needs to meet but my own. On the other hand, Gven Golly and I both come home to a proverbial 'empty nest', although I hate that term, and can only guess what our two full-grown, mostly independent birds are up to on a given day. It's like living in another dimension to realize that my major adventure in my journey through this decade consists of participating - at a distance - in their adventures along their journeys.

We communicate, of course, and they keep us informed of the events that they think make the most difference to us. I'll see Helga this week, for example, and she'll be coming home for the summer in the middle of May. We're looking forward to Jessi and his friend Alex stopping by for a few days on their way back to New York later this month. The rest of the time, it's hit-or-miss, mostly miss. We're slowly getting used to it.

I sat behind an interesting youngish family in church on Sunday: (right to left) father, teenage son, middle son, younger daughter, mother. A handsome family, or maybe I'm just partial to redheads. Nice haircuts, nice clothes, not fancy or ostentacious, just attentive. Lots of eye-contact and concern when the younger kids got rambunctious. The little girl went up front for story time and then right off to RE (Sunday school), but the younger boy didn't want to go, and there was a moment of disagreement and resistance before he finally settled into a parental lap. It's complicated getting used to a new place, and it was touching to watch these two conscientious parents deal with it while probably having their own doubts. Or not. I'm just observing this unfolding semi-private family moment in the midst of their ongoing, unique family dynamics, and projecting some of my own experience on what I see.

Multiply those moments of questioning how to DO THE RIGHT THING times 24/7 and you have the rich, juicy reality of family life. What's the line attributed to Leo Tolstoy? "Happy families are all alike." I beg to differ, Count Leo. Maybe unhappy, traumatized families make better Romantic (as opposed to merely romantic) novels, but I suspect there's character, plot, setting, tone, conflict, dramatic tension, and change in every family all the time. It keeps it interesting.