Sunday, October 13, 2019
Family Ties
My mother has been in town for the first time in a few months, so we've been having a lot of family time the past few days. It's strange how, even though I'm forty-one, I can still find myself falling back into the old family dynamics when we're all together. I feel weird eating in front of my mother, as though she's counting my calories from a distance, or find myself relitigating old arguments with my sister about the time I made her walk part of the way home from the Y or the time she hit me in the face with a golf club. I could really be 13 again, except with better skin and clothes my mother didn't pick out for me.
We do generally have a nice time together, though. We took my niece and nephew down to my office in Willis Tower so they could marvel at things like desk chairs and glass doors while utterly ignoring the panoramic views. I taught my nephew to play Wii, by which I mean I helped him create a Mii that he insisted should look absolutely nothing like him and then played games with his hand under mine on the controller so he would feel like he was doing something. He definitely declared victory after each game, so I must have been doing something right. And I took my mom to the Art Institute, where we saw Impressionist pastels, Mexican Modernism, and tourist randomly blocking traffic to take selfies with the Seurats.
As they say, family is complicated. But what is life without a few complications?
My mother has been in town for the first time in a few months, so we've been having a lot of family time the past few days. It's strange how, even though I'm forty-one, I can still find myself falling back into the old family dynamics when we're all together. I feel weird eating in front of my mother, as though she's counting my calories from a distance, or find myself relitigating old arguments with my sister about the time I made her walk part of the way home from the Y or the time she hit me in the face with a golf club. I could really be 13 again, except with better skin and clothes my mother didn't pick out for me.
We do generally have a nice time together, though. We took my niece and nephew down to my office in Willis Tower so they could marvel at things like desk chairs and glass doors while utterly ignoring the panoramic views. I taught my nephew to play Wii, by which I mean I helped him create a Mii that he insisted should look absolutely nothing like him and then played games with his hand under mine on the controller so he would feel like he was doing something. He definitely declared victory after each game, so I must have been doing something right. And I took my mom to the Art Institute, where we saw Impressionist pastels, Mexican Modernism, and tourist randomly blocking traffic to take selfies with the Seurats.
As they say, family is complicated. But what is life without a few complications?
