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carose59"A Disagreement In My Family Involves Restraining Orders, And Bloodshed."*
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This morning I got an email from my cousin in Texas. He had found out my mother had died while he was doing some genealogy stuff online. He didn't find out shortly after it happened because I didn't have his phone number. He didn't find out from the card I sent him because I didn't have his new address. And this is somehow my fault and I didn't behave properly when his mother died (when he wrote and told me although I never heard from him) and he's not sure he wants to come visit because he doesn't think anyone cares about seeing him.
I wish he would come, but I don't particularly want to see him. The rest of the family seemed to enjoy him. I got tired of the long silences after I spoke, as though he was trying to figure out what I was talking about and why I was wasting his time. I think I'm too much of a Kiesel to fit with the Donahues, and I don't even know any Kiesels.**
As I was writing this, I thought of something that happened many years ago, when my father was still alive. My step-cousin, Steve, was inexplicably angry at my parents about something, and one thing he said was that nobody ever treated them like they were Kiesels, that they weren't invited to family gatherings.
Afterward, when my mother told me about this, I said, "You should have told him that being excluded and ignored is being treated like a Kiesel! He was being treated exactly like a Kiesel." That is not an exaggeration. My grandmother kept the family entertaining segregated. We were invited over when my father's father's family was in town. My father's brother was invited for actual fun party-type things--and for all I know, he was the only one invited. My mother and I were once excluded from a family reunion.
I could stretch a point and understand my mother, since she's only a Kiesel by marriage (although my grandmother was going and she, too, was only by marriage), but me? And I look like my father! Who looked like his father! What the hell?
I was in high school when the family reunion occurred, or just graduated, and I didn't particularly want to go. And I still find it all amusing. But it is telling that there is family on both sides that feels like they're being excluded, that they think they're being treated differently when what they're complaining about is being treated the same. This is what my whole family is like. It isn't any better on the inside than the outside because there doesn't seem to be any actual inside. No wonder I became a professional outsider.
*Joe Morelli
**That isn't strictly true. I have a cousin, Patty, who is my father's brother's daughter. I sent her a note when my mother died (pretty much the same note I sent my cousin Jeff) and found a message from her stepbrother—or maybe ex-stepbrother, since her father divorced his mother—in the mailbox last Friday. So I called and got condolences from him and I called to see how she was.
Patty was always slow, but I'm thinking years of antipsychotics have done a number on her. She didn't seem to know why I had called. It was hard to talk to her on a number of levels. (She's about ten years older than me I am, but even when I was in grade school, I had to slow way, way down for her.) I worry about her.
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This morning I got an email from my cousin in Texas. He had found out my mother had died while he was doing some genealogy stuff online. He didn't find out shortly after it happened because I didn't have his phone number. He didn't find out from the card I sent him because I didn't have his new address. And this is somehow my fault and I didn't behave properly when his mother died (when he wrote and told me although I never heard from him) and he's not sure he wants to come visit because he doesn't think anyone cares about seeing him.
I wish he would come, but I don't particularly want to see him. The rest of the family seemed to enjoy him. I got tired of the long silences after I spoke, as though he was trying to figure out what I was talking about and why I was wasting his time. I think I'm too much of a Kiesel to fit with the Donahues, and I don't even know any Kiesels.**
As I was writing this, I thought of something that happened many years ago, when my father was still alive. My step-cousin, Steve, was inexplicably angry at my parents about something, and one thing he said was that nobody ever treated them like they were Kiesels, that they weren't invited to family gatherings.
Afterward, when my mother told me about this, I said, "You should have told him that being excluded and ignored is being treated like a Kiesel! He was being treated exactly like a Kiesel." That is not an exaggeration. My grandmother kept the family entertaining segregated. We were invited over when my father's father's family was in town. My father's brother was invited for actual fun party-type things--and for all I know, he was the only one invited. My mother and I were once excluded from a family reunion.
I could stretch a point and understand my mother, since she's only a Kiesel by marriage (although my grandmother was going and she, too, was only by marriage), but me? And I look like my father! Who looked like his father! What the hell?
I was in high school when the family reunion occurred, or just graduated, and I didn't particularly want to go. And I still find it all amusing. But it is telling that there is family on both sides that feels like they're being excluded, that they think they're being treated differently when what they're complaining about is being treated the same. This is what my whole family is like. It isn't any better on the inside than the outside because there doesn't seem to be any actual inside. No wonder I became a professional outsider.
*Joe Morelli
**That isn't strictly true. I have a cousin, Patty, who is my father's brother's daughter. I sent her a note when my mother died (pretty much the same note I sent my cousin Jeff) and found a message from her stepbrother—or maybe ex-stepbrother, since her father divorced his mother—in the mailbox last Friday. So I called and got condolences from him and I called to see how she was.
Patty was always slow, but I'm thinking years of antipsychotics have done a number on her. She didn't seem to know why I had called. It was hard to talk to her on a number of levels. (She's about ten years older than me I am, but even when I was in grade school, I had to slow way, way down for her.) I worry about her.