Fathers

A response to Brian Doyle's essay "Two on Two":

Dear Mr. Doyle,
I really enjoyed your essay. Freshman year at BYU, I saw a Japanese film called Twilight Samurai, about a father dedicated to his family, giving everything so his two girls will have a mother and a future. Ever since, one of the themes I’ve been really fascinated with is fatherhood. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of good examples of fatherhood out there. Unlike for women, there isn’t a lot of discussion in the world about what it means to be a man and how a man should relate to a family. As a recently married Mormon woman, I look at my husband and know that he has been raised—indoctrinated, really—to believe that a family and children will be the pinnacle of his life. He gets this not only from our religion but also from his father who teaches in the School of Family Life here at BYU. I look at these two men, my husband and my father-in-law, and compare them to the images I see of men in the media: anti-social gamers, the protagonists of shoot-em-up films, sports stars, high-powered corporate lawyers. When was the last time you saw a film about a man who was really comfortable with his family? And they say that women face the problem of a false media image? Thanks for writing about what’s real, the simple joy of life.
-Liz Busby

Family Stories

Did I mention how much I love my study abroad class? For the midterm, we got to make up our own questions related to the ideas we're discussing about the stories, and then just free-write about them for a class period. Awesomeness. The question I choose was "How are our roles in my family shaped by the stories we tell about each other? Do the stories we tell change the roles we play?" The question comes from David Copperfield--how his uncle Murdstone labels him unfairly as a problem child after only one incident. I think we tend to do this a lot in our lives, and I wanted to explore how my family does it. Anyway, I think the results are pretty interesting, and some of you might appreciate them. It was a good midterm though. It challenged me to write stories, rather than philosophy, which is something I need to practice. And I haven't done any editing yet for tone shifts and misspellings, so cut me some slack.

The least favorite story I’ve ever had told about me by my family is that I’m controlling. I’m an oldest child, it’s what I’m supposed to do, right? I spent a lot of my childhood babysitting younger siblings, or helping them out in school. In return for all this help, I’ve always felt like I deserved some sort of authority, like I should have a say. Authority’s probably not really the word I’m looking for, I guess. It’s more like advisory. I want to have my opinion count for something, to be able to give advice like a parent would. It’s the least I can ask: in exchange for the responsibility, shouldn’t I get a few of the rights?

But about when I was 15, my parents decided I was too controlling. Our family was never one to talk about these sorts of issues behind closed doors, in a calm and rational way. I think it started at the dinner table one night, when I was advising my sister on how to deal with her crazy friends who were always in some sort of drama. It seemed to come out of nowhere: “Liz, you’re not the mom. Stop it,” my sister said. I tried to defend everything I said as completely objective, and looked to my parents for backup on this. But I found the tables had been turned on me: “No, Liz, she’s right; you aren’t the parent, so you need to stay out of everyone else’s business.”

For the next few years, the phrase “you’re not the mom” haunted most of my hours at home. Like Murdstone’s labeling of Davy—“Be careful. I bite.”—it was soon blown past any original meaning. It was certainly true at one level that I needed to stop controlling people. It’s a problem that I’ll need to battle for a long time yet. But the phrase soon just popped out whenever I talked at home. I couldn’t state an opinion about whether it was going to rain tomorrow without being accused of coveting my former role. At first, I would try to explain how the situation was not at all similar to the original problem, but it took so much effort that I soon gave it up as a lost cause. It got to the point where I simply didn’t want to talk any more at home because no one would respond to what I was saying. All they could see was the problem.

***

Michael is my second youngest brother. Actually, he’s the second oldest too. He’s right in the middle of the three brothers—Spencer, Michael, and Josh. And he acted like a typical middle child, trapped in the middle of nowhere. He and Spencer never got along well. This is partially because for most of his childhood, Spencer was possessed of some sort of demon that convinced him the best way to have fun was to try to push other people’s buttons. Not in a friendly sort of way—the way you might tease someone who you loved. Not in a sadistic kind of way either—it wasn’t the same as the sick kid down the street who enjoyed mutilating animals for fun. It was really just a kind of psychological warfare, or perhaps experiment, for Spencer: to find the smallest thing that annoyed someone, something completely ordinary like putting his feet on top of your magazine or sitting in the chair right behind you when you practiced piano, something he could do completely on accident, and then to do it subtly and repeatedly until his victim’s temper finally exploded with nothing to blame for it.

Michael was his favorite victim because he had more of a temper than the rest of us. He had a hard time expressing himself with words—we later found out he was dyslexic—so he would lash out with his body. And since they were only two years apart, they were always together at family activities. They were expected to play together (as siblings who are close in age usually are; it never seems to work out well though). Spencer understood Michael inside and out, watched him like a hawk. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a list somewhere of all the tools Spencer could use to upset Michael.

It started out as only once or twice a week, but at its peak, there’d be a major fight once or twice an hour. Spencer would start out by breathing too loudly, or sitting too closely. Michael tried to tolerate it for as long as he could, but eventually he would just explode. Fists would be flying and hair would be pulled. Unfortunately, by then, Michael would be too mentally off-balance to do much damage while Spencer would be cool as a cucumber, keeping himself just out of harm’s way until Mom arrived. Then he’d play the innocent victim: “I wasn’t doing anything, Mom. He just started hitting me.”

My mom knew better, of course. I don’t think mothers ever really believe their children’s excuses, and she’d known about Spencer’s experiments for a long time. But I think she, like the rest of us had long given up trying to change Spencer. He seemed perversely stuck with who he was, and we’d just have to pray he’d grow out of it someday. No, she’d give Spencer a verbal slap on the wrist, and then turn to Michael. “You know, he can’t make you angry unless you let him. You just have to ignore him.” Every time, every day, the same thing.

It just became another tool in Spencer’s toolbox.

***

My mom and dad’s relationship has always been interesting. To this day, I’m not sure how they got together. They just seem so different from each other. Dad studied accounting and political science at school: can you get more practical than that? Meanwhile, my mother meandered through college. First, she studied computer science, practical enough, though I don’t think she did it to make money, but just because she liked the idea. But her real love showed through when she got her second degree in English and eventually earned her Master’s in--Horrors!--English. As impractical as you can get, though I still go to her when I need to talk about a good book or understand some doctrinal issue.

She was supposed to be abstract and flighty, or at least that’s the story my dad always used to tell about her. “Mom can’t multitask,” he would always say. He meant it kindly, and you could see that it was true. When she was talking to someone on the phone, you couldn’t have gotten her attention to let her know that her shoes were on fire. And speaking of fires, there was one time when she put cookies in the oven and then took all the kids to the library. Being raised by an English major, of course these trips took well over an hour. We returned to a smell like a charcoal bar-b-que that hadn’t been cleaned all winter had been lit inside the house. I still remember looking at those dozen cookies on the cookie sheet: perfectly round black circles, like I’d imagined coal might be.

She was always doing things like that when she was cooking, not adding the yeast into the bread dough or forgetting about the five pounds of raw meat she’d been defrosting in the microwave, so that you’d find the next morning when you went to heat up your oatmeal. Dad, on the other hand, has always been a wonderful cook. He can balance five different dishes and have them all finish at exactly the same time so that everything would be hot and fresh. And his cookies are still something I ask for every time I come home.

My mom always laughs it off when my dad points out her impracticality. “That’s why I married your dad,” she said, “so you kids would have some chance at not being scatterbrained like me.” But sometimes I see tears in her eyes when Dad would harass her after a particularly bad cooking fiasco, like the turkey that never seemed to be done.

Out

I hate being sick. It makes my brain all fuzzy. Maybe I've got a wrackspurt. I also hate the missing-of-class aspect, especially today, since we're discussing Nibley's "Zeal without Knowledge," which I really liked. I can't really think to write anything coherent, so here I am rambling along.

I bought a dress for the Bishop's Ball (our ward's formal dance) from my aunt's store. It's pale pink, and a lot more feminine than I usually would go for. I blame it on the sickness and the sinister influence of my aunt (who got all the family girliness instead of my mom). I'd put a picture up, but I can't find one online, and I'm too lazy to put it on again. They'll be some come Friday (when the Bishop's Ball is). But it looks pretty nice.

Checks are starting to come in the mail. No, not for writing, or covert sting operations. They're just rebates from my after-Thanksgiving spending spree. Still, it's like finding money you didn't know you had. :D

George introduced me to the visual thesaurus. Addictive, and free on campus. Useful for poetry.

Why doesn't Google Reader have a search feature like Gmail? How am I supposed to find things? What? Browse manually? Where the heck is that post on managing long sentences that I wanted to read? This is a paragraph of questions?

I'm growing to dislike my creative writing class. I mean, I like the force motivating me to write (good writing needs good deadlines), but they don't really say anything helpful. I brought in three poems the other day and all I got was, "Those are really good." Hello, I know that. But I want them to be better! I guess it's my fault for waiting until junior year to take a creative writing class and getting stuck with a bunch of clueless freshmen and non-English-majors. At least the teacher is one of the editors of Irreantum, which is cool.

(Speaking of said poems, anyone want to look over them? My brain is starving for feedback!)

I have no good tags to file this post under.

Maybe I'll call in sick to work and just sit here watching Breakfast at Tiffany's and knit. Or read My Name is Asher Lev, which I'm supposed to finish by Wednesday for creative writing. Unlikely, I think.

Traa-di-shon! Tradition!

Yeah, I guess it’s been a while since I posted. Well, in case you didn’t catch it in the comments in Thursday’s post, my boyfriend and I broke up. So I’ve been trying to avoid doing too much thinking, which means a decrease in blog posts. Don’t worry, I’m feeling much better thanks to my amazing roommates, and of course there’s no cure for break-up blues like the holidays, so I’m back.

So about the holidays: I highly doubt if anyone could find a more tradition-bound family than mine at this time of year. Almost all of my mom’s siblings’ families live within an hour drive of my grandmother’s house in East Millcreek, so we get together a lot during the holidays. (More than usual—the extended family gets together at least twice a month as it is. I miss them when I’m stuck in Provo.) And the 30-40 of us can sure have a lot of fun. Who needs friends when you have family? Anyway, as a result of spending massive amounts of time together, traditions just seem to spring out of nowhere. Almost every single day of this season has its own special traditions.

The day before Thanksgiving is officially known as Pie Day in the Miller family. We fill the kitchen of my grandmother’s house with enough estrogen to scare away men for miles around. Large amounts of Chinese food are consumed as the pies are prepared for Thanksgiving and a Christmas movie plays in the background. This year we only needed sixteen pie crusts, a record low, I think. There was one year we made over 30 pies. In order to chill all the pie dough, we had to empty out the ice cube maker in the freezer. An unsuspecting uncle wandered in looking for a glass of water and ended up with a glass full of pie crust—in the Miller family, we have pie crust on tap!

Then Thanksgiving itself: we usually cook a couple turkeys in several different ways. My uncle Dennis, when he was alive, would always deep-fry a turkey. Holy cow is that good stuff! This year we had a brined turkey in addition to the normal roasted version. We usually have about 40 pounds of mashed potatoes—can’t risk running out. Lots of homemade rolls and cranberry sauce. But my favorite traditional food is rainbow jello. I made it this year—it takes about 3 hours—and it was really good.

After dinner, we laze around for a few hours. There’s usually a Christmas craft project—candy advent calendars this year—and football on the TV. Everyone continues snitching food, grazing as their stomachs settle down. In a few hours, we’ll clear everything off and set out the pies. Once we’ve all had pie, we officially open the Christmas season by singing along to “Sleigh Ride” by the Osmonds—not “Jingle Bells/Sleigh Ride,” the real “Sleigh Ride.” You can’t get it on CD. We had to get it transferred from the record. :D Anyway, we all sing at the top of our lungs, doing the air guitar and sliding up to high falsetto parts. It’s great! That song means Christmas and family in my mind. When I’m feeling homesick, I’ll turn it on, be it December or July. Then we draw names for the Christmas gift exchange.

My dad and I always do Black Friday shopping together. The last few hours of Thanksgiving day are spent perusing the newspaper ads, planning our attack strategy. This year we were up at 3:30 AM, outside Circuit City at 4, inside at 5, and out at 5:30. We did pretty well: I got a 1 GB SD memory card for $3, a 1 GB flash drive for $4, and a 7 megapixel digital camera for $130. We managed to also hit Target ($4 DVDs, newer releases too), FYE (the new Media Play—I picked up some new headphones and got to talk to a really interesting lady in the line. She works for the railroad.), and RC Willey (Marisa—we have a new DVD player! How much do you love me?). All in all, it was a pretty good year for the bargain hunters. To me, it’s like a game to plan the best strategy for dodging the crowds in the stores and to guess which items will go first. Yeah, it’s a little materialistic and, oh, insane, but then again, it’s way fun and I save a bunch of money.

The holidays are sort of a weird time for me. Usually, I value my alone time a lot. I'm quite "solitary as an oyster." (You better know where that's from.) But during Christmas, I can't get enough of people. I just want to be around them. We don't necessarily have to do anything; it's enough just to be. To quote a Christmas classic: "I’m crowded, but at least I’m loved."

Family Drama

This post is an update of an old personal narrative of mine. I found it again while doing some spring cleaning in my filing cabinet. Since then, I've been thinking about it a lot, especially in light of Katherine's blog. I think it's relevant to most of our families, so I thought I'd post it here.

Prologue
Who am I? The oldest, the clean freak, the over-achiever, maybe the bossy one, probably not the kindest, and certainly not the most athletic. That part's easy, but since this act is my life, identifying me gets more complicated.

Act I
The oven timer buzzes in the kitchen, begging Mom to return to cooking dinner. She claims she has stepped away for just a moment. I doubt it. Plastic swords click and clack down the hall, eventually interrupted by wails of terror and pounding feet. Josh has decided he's done with the duel. Michael decides he's not. The opening theme of Star Wars and the clinking of knitting needles comes from the back room, where Heather is working on her latest project: a fluffy scarf in shocking pink.

From the front room, Spencer's fingers fly up and down the piano, the buzzing notes forming the incessant melody of "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Listening to it for the first time was quite a remarkable experience; the song sounded so like a bee flying around your head at a picnic. However, the droning melody could be tolerated only so many times before the desire to squash the insect overpowered the listener. Spencer had been playing the song obsessively for the past hour, and now my fingers itched to take a flyswatter to the keyboard. Luckily, Dad was at work, or the cheering crowd of the NBA semifinals would be added to the already intolerable din.

"Spencer, could you please practice later? I need to study and that song is driving me insane," I pleaded, trudging into the front room with a week's worth of biology notes.

"You messed me up! Now I'm going to have to start all over," he said, with a suspiciously undisappointed grin. "Go study somewhere else."

"I can hear you everywhere in the house, so it doesn't really matter. I have a test tomorrow! Come on!"

"Then go outside. I was here first."

"Argh!"

Act II
"Michael, leave Josh alone. Josh, stop overreacting to Mike. He's just tring to bug you," I quipped, trying to diffuse yet another fight.

"Shut up, Liz! Stop being the mom!" Mike shouts back. His words deflate my false sense of impartiality. Those syllables recall weeks and months of built up tension, mostly from parents who wanted me to stop being so critical and finally coined that wonderful phrase. Of course, the issue couldn't be handled privately and personally. Our family never addressed any elephant sitting on the front lawn until tempers flared and someone wanted to inflict maximum damage.

"You're not the mom, Liz." That phrase, in all its variations, served quite well as the all-purpose comeback, and my siblings had used it to a fault. Seldom could I speak a word without having that refrain echo back to my ears. The constant repetition had created a definite bitterness.

But it's not as simple as that, I rationalize. I know I'm bossy, but I don't do it because I want to be or because I think I'm in charge. All right, sometimes my motives are purely selfish, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes I just want some peace and quiet, for the chaos to just stop. Is it so unfair to want some peace in my own house?

Irrationally, against anyone's better judgment, fragmented emotions stream out of my mouth, the ones that had stewed for weeks. Now they made little sense outside my own head. "You shut up! I know I should stop. So thanks for telling me again, as if I don't get reminded of my biggest fault every second of every day! And I try, I really do. But could you just stop? I can't take all this any more. I'm just trying to help! I don't care what you say."

It's a lie, an act.

Act III
"What?" I said.

I had lost them in November. It was now June.

"We found your DVDs. While Heather was gone at camp, I was cleaning her room and found them under a pile of socks in her closet," said my mother, holding up the discovered items.

I grabbed the DVDs out of her hand and shuffled through them. "But I've been looking for those forever! I specifically asked her if she knew where they were, like, a million times!"

Mom drew her breath, trying to figure out how best to put what she had to say. "When I asked her about them, she said she was sick of you watching that show all the time. You know how she hates it. So she took them."

She stole them.

My breath lodged in my throat as the universe paused. Heather and I had never been close, except in age: sisters, but not friends. I was the designated honors student; she hated me for it and made sure not to do anything that I had ever tried. We even went to separate high schools. We were too different. Despite that, I suddenly felt betrayed, unsafe in my own house. I had found other things of mine in her room before, but never anything as costly and arbitrary as this. What about that brush that disappeared last week? Is that hiding in a drawer in her dresser? Was my favorite shirt stashed under her bed? That single act forcibly removed a security blanket I didn't know I had, leaving me old in my own stronghold.

She stole them.

The universe and my breath rushed back in shuddering sobs.

Act IV
"Mark, Cristina, and the new baby are coming to Salt Lake on Thursday," Mom proclaimed that afternoon. "Cristina's still very sick; she needs people to help her take care of Amelia."

I was still in a state of shock at the suddenness of the events. While most of our family lived in Salt Lake, my aunt and uncle lived across the country. When Cristina became very ill after giving birth, they had no family around to help them. So we brought them here, just like that, without a second thought. I heard the phone conversations myself. "Don't worry about the money." "You just need to be here so you can get better." "It'll all work out."

Mom continued, "Our family is going to fast for Cristina tomorrow, and we're getting together tonight to start with a family prayer. It would be nice if you all could come. Are you guys doing anything too important?" Afterschool clubs and parties quickly melted away.

That night at Aunt Tera's house, we gathered my mom's side of the family--about 40 people, on a few hours notice. The younger cousins chased each other around the house, creating the usual bedlam of a family party, except without the food. Aunts and uncles deftly completed travel and living arrangements, discussed earlier by phone. Those who didn't have room for houseguests offered to baby-sit or provided money for the plane tickets from Washington, D. C. Then, children were herded back into the main room and silenced as we prepared to begin our fast with a prayer. Though the exact phrases weren't memorable, the spirit in the room was extraordinary. I felt a sense of unity . . . and something else, something that I had been so lacking.

This unselfish act set me thinking. There's more here.

Act V
Something was unfinished. I couldn't sleep.

So I began to walk around the house. I shuffled over the forest green carpet in the basement, dodging the usual clutter: unfinished Lego sculptures, a jumble of video tapes invariably not rewound or put back in the case, torn-out pages from YM and Teen, stacks of paper filled with Heather's drawings and story ideas, Discover card bills, and manila folders. But whatever I was looking for wasn't there.

I walked up the stairs, covered in green also. In the kitchen, dinner dishes remained unwashed because of the usual fight over whose turn it was, with more bills and offical looking papers covering the counter. The refridgerator hummed invitingly, but I didn't exactly feel like a midnight snack. What did I need?

The family room: Dad fallen asleep watching TV on the blue sofa again, after another 12-hour day at the job he hated. In the flickering blue light of the local newscast, Spencer was still avidly watching the results of the Jazz game (he never missed the sports--every night at 9:45). As I look at him, something finally clicks.

Inexplicably, I shuffle over to the couch. I reach over to give him a hug, which he is too tired to resist.

"I love you," I realized, and shuffled back to bed.

Epilogue
It's hard to whittle down a lifetime's worth of pain and love into a single play, with themes and a conclusion, mostly because there isn't a conclusion. Life must keep going and going. People keep getting broken and pieced back together, reshaped, and remade. I'm never quite sure who I am, but I keep acting out the play the best I can because that's the way it has to be.