Houston Southard

A Family Afar

Christmas has always been weird, and my reaction to people's reactions about how I feel about Christmas has always made me feel just as weird.

Even broken families have a special spot in their minds for the holidays. Functional - or more often dysfunctional - families get together and become versions of themselves they were when they lived with family-turned-unfamiliars.

And for better or worse, for how snooty or judged any of us feel, when we're all together, we're still together, and there's something special about that.

For us, as I'm sure isn't a rare occurrence for a lot, a lot of those family's members only exist for us during the holidays.

For us, they were always ever only an 8-hour argumentative- and tension-filled drive away.

When you see family like that, only once every [enter funeral/birthday-adjacent event here], you don't just become a version of yourself you were when you lived alongside your kin, you become a cocktail version of it. Blood is strong, but distance comes close in second. We learn about each other in bursts that come when they come, seldom enough or just quite not enough for that stranger anger to take hold and make us feel like those we still hold closest are withholding.

The cocktail us is a very strange version of us. We want to show off the best sides of ourselves: amplify the good and dampen the bad so that each side thinks the other is doing as well as ever. We forget we do that as an 'old habits die hard' way of proving to any who ever questioned us that we're better than what the others thought we were.

And the sad thing is, beyond the politicking and posturing of it all, we're all actually happy to see each other. That feeling just happens alongside entering the bizarre reality show of estranged family gatherings that makes everyone act like an on-camera version of themselves.

The baggage is there, as it is in any relationship dynamic. The baggage that comes with the baggage, too. But the idea of family is gene-deep. We can't not feel the way we do with them the same way we can with anyone else close to us.

Now imagine being a kid of a distanced or circumstanced dynamic like that. Christmas becomes a confusing thing. The events we somehow felt forced to attend, the holidays otherwise associated with relaxing, became instead unspoken game-faced events that weren't relaxing at all. We saw our parents with their guards up, and in turn put up some of our own, turn regularly jovial events into a burden. Traveling to places only familiar to us in those tiny annual pockets of time, staying in unfamiliar places and trying to act normal to people who have a different way of thinking about what normal is.

It's a bit of a powder keg, really. You guys might think the same thing, but one generation removed and it's still that while also feeling like you're entering the 7th season of a tv show where you're meant to understand the underlying relationships and formative points of each group's lives, yet don't.

I'm sure this is also my bias, but it makes you a bit more observant. The way people talk to each other, then about those others when they aren't around. Gossip is gene-deep too, but in families the undertones are more loaded. We want the rush of the rich social exchange that happens when we talk gush over a juicy story about someone mutually known. That doesn't mean it's not exclusive from the nostalgia of talking about family, about people we care about, even if how we care about them has become somewhat of a black box we can't put the right words or feelings to.

I make fun of my mom for telling old stories because after a while the real events get mixed up and forgotten. What gets forgotten gets filled in and fabricated with fictions to ease our minds of the panic of not remembering, so what we remember becomes a story of the event instead of the event itself. That's really all memory is, a story of your story because of blind spots in memory. Mom doesn't like it when I put it in those terms, but it shouldn't diminish it just because it's true. The blindspot in the eye isn't a dysfunction. It's an adaptation. Our retinas catch all the light around us, but because it needs to send it to back to be interpreted by the visual cortex so we can experience the world we're seeing, the nerve attached to the retina has to clear a path from the eye to the inside, making a blind spot in our vision. Just like memory, we fill in the blind spot with what ought to be there. Blind spots are necessary, and in the case of memory, the fact that our brains are scrambling to fill in those gaps with stories of stories means we care to fill them in.

Memory is a very weird thing. We lose important things all the time, and there's a weird way that the world disables the clinical diagnoses of losing your memory. Sure, dementia and Alzheimers have their progressive and eventual physical and developmental consequences, but in the end we're all always losing our memories anyway.

It's a funny thing that people believe in souls strongest when the memory starts to go. If the soul is separate from the body, the electrical signals that fire around your noggin suddenly starting to fizzle out shouldn't worry any soul believer. The entire idea of being "you" is just noise created from all the parts of your brain talking to each other all at once, creating the illusion of a sense of self, of consciousness. That can't be anything but a physical thing. So if you're into souls, and think it's not a physical thing, then whatever or wherever you think that silly thing is has no effect on the physical, or the physical degradation, of memory.

We're who we are solely because of what happens on that physical level, though. Environmentally, sociologically, neurologically, however you want to cut it up. But people who live through loved ones losing their minds makes them remember the affected that way. We can't not have the fear of thinking what our loved one is becoming is what their soul is becoming.

I think that was my attempt at optimism. Or encouragement.

Anyway, I remember the rush of sneaking beers with Luke on the porch swing outside Nanny's. Chris as the first-born enabling provocateur. Tommy as the bright little hustler who would never let me win in a game of backyard half-court 1 on 1. Justin as the kind-hearted kid wanting to live up to the badass his dad saw him as. Veritable strangers, one and all, but cousins all the same. The estranged brothers I never had. Memories, or memories of memories, that still live rent free in my head.

I remember Busch and garage ping pong with Jeff and learning to love zombie movies in the man cave. Michelle as the less coddling, no BS mom who could handle me in the way only a mother of someone just like her own son could. Jarrett as the disappointed but calm dad only capable of what constituted as patience because he knew dealing with us (me) was a temporary event. Kim as the pariah. The black sheep and self-inflicted fall girl as she silently shouldered the burden of first born syndrome.

I loved Buddy, or the stories I've been told and have told to myself. But the only grandpa I've ever really had in my life has been Steve. There's things between him and each of you, and me too. Amused at my expense, the spoiled shithead city boy, but amused all the same, which was nice, because you pay attention to what you're amused by. The big chew he let me have for my first time. Some sips of some stuff. Playing cards in the kitchen nook after opening gifts. Grandpa Steve.

And then there's the one I guess I'm rambling on about all this in the first place. The Nanny propelled by a mountain of drinks made by the same company that makes mountain dew. TEETH BE DAMNED! The woman had a house and a school to run. The sweater clad energizer bunny matriarch shuffling at super speed in shaded bifocals, varicose veins bursting out of jean shorts as she'd dart back and forth across the gravel to scold someone about something.

The plaque seizing on the synaptic connections that make you you are fast at work. Aging sucks any which way you cut it. I can relate. My back is sore from getting out of bed now. Can you believe that?!

It doesn't mean you aren't still the powerhouse of the family. Nanny with the cookies and diabetes-inducing sweet tea in the plastic pitchers.

Unlike Grandpas, I had Grandmas in spades. Quilting Sue, swearing that swear words were cardinal sins. John Deer-driving Dorothy and her bird watching and dandelion wine casks and whatever the hell her self-proclaimed jungle juice elixir was.

But you've been my only Grandma as Grandmas are meant to be. The traditional Grandma of the white picket nuclear american family dream experience. You might know I'm no sucker for tradition, but being part of a pair that sit at the head of now three other generations was still formative, and foundational. And distant as we are, and now that the holiday days are mostly over, at least in the mandatory way, it's nice to look back on the cramped house Christmases in the small town ranch, all the kids of the kids living out the holidays like wanderlust backpackers hosteling in someone's den on a pull-out or air mattress, entrenched together, getting the runoff of the reunion of a family that knows they love each other, but have never felt they figured out how to say so.

Happy birthday, Nanny. If you really are Nanny anymore. Kidding, the average age of any cell in the body is only seven years. Every half fortyear, every one of us is physically a whole new person. And if my rant made any sort of sense, the memory is a physical little thing. Your sense of yourself can change in an instant. Life is very weird, if you're into thinking about it that way. It's also just a thing that we so happen to be lucky enough to experience together, and in the little moments of togetherness, like the one you guys get to have today, I hope that's what you guys are focusing on. We only get one ticket for this thing, so it's good when we remember how we cherish each other on the one-way ride.

Love you all, sorry I was too busy galavanting on my liberal hipster wedding quest to be there in person this year. At least I'll be in your memories.

Houston