You’re sitting in your mom’s house, eating too much of her leftover food, playing with the progeny among her things, looking at photos you don’t remember ever having seen before, laughing and crying simultaneously at the proposterous nature of you and your family.
We’re all struggling in some way or other. If you deny that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Perhaps you like being alone.
Normally the thought of having zero contact with anyone would’ve sounded amazing. You’d have taken that deal in a heartbeat.
Now look at you. How’s that ‘i hate everyone’ stance looking now, you hypocritical fool?
Perhaps you’re rarely alone in your normal daily life with work obligations and family commitments.
And now?
How’re you distracting yourself now?
Perhaps you read articles about an uptick in domestic violence during times like these and think, ‘That could never happen to me. I certainly would never do that.’
Then your husband or partner smacks his lips while he’s eating, like he’s done since right after you both got married to be honest, and you think to yourself, ‘Why isn’t there more domestic violence?’
Your partner knows how to push your buttons like nearly no-one else.
My mother was a master button pusher of mine. She knew exactly where my buttons were.
Very few people have that knowledge that she possessed.
Where my most vulnerable spots are.
At this point, it’s just my brother from the original four of us. He’s much more polite than I’ve ever managed to be, so it’s mostly me offending and then scraping and begging for forgiveness.
It’s a joy, I tell you. But I bring it on myself. If I knew how to act right most of the time, I wouldn’t struggle with people.
Right?
It just so happens that this #covid19 pandemic means for me that I have much more interaction these days with the people I least want to deal with.
Family.
They’re never easy cooped up in close quarters. What would we do these days without connection to the outside world?
To the people we normally tolerate ‘out there’?
Ask my brother Michael about Luling, Texas. We might still be traumatised by that story.
I know I am.
Stuck in a hotel room after we slid on black ice and totalled our van, we got to spend an inordinate amount of quality time together that week. It felt like a month in that godforsaken tiny hotel room.
I’ll never forget my dad accusing one of us of being passive aggressive and my response?
Dude, you’re like a year or two dry and clearly aa isn’t working for you, you old coot. Go back to your psycho babble meetings and learn about projection.
I was a joy, huh?
Want another dark family story?
Our trip driving my stuff home from Cincinnati, after finally finishing school.
Brother Michael and I were so loving toward one another that I almost walked away from the car and took a train.
Dramatic, much?
Ask my wife. I’m a pleasure to live with.
Now, aside from Miriam and our kid, all of you people are here inside my phone.
Both available and not available at the weirdest most inappropriate times.
If you want some advice you didn’t ask for, I’d say shut the hell up for a change.
I assure you I’m trying to practise what I preach.
With questionable results.
Thanks to this virus, we’re all forced to live closer to someone most of us have been running from for years if not decades.
Ourselves.
