Thanksgiving is right around the corner and what comes to mind are all the families gathering, and what seems to happen to those of us who are estranged, we feel somewhat stranger than normal.
While most seem to put aside their petty differences, those of us who have major differences are left without an option.
Family squabbles can be hushed for this special day, a joining of hands and hearts, all gathering to give thanks, “for all that we have and that we are all here together”.
Raising us up to a false sense of okay, allowing us to focus on what was working and letting our differences sit on the sides.
As my mother prayed for us to be together and her thanks in gratitude for what she had, she painted a nice picture, and we all helped her paint with our silence and not challenging her ways.
I heard Elizabeth Lesser speak today about normal families, and how she heard that “normal means someone you don’t know well”.
Normal is the picture of the surface; normal is the front that is shown to those we don’t know that well.
So if you like I seem to feel left out of ‘normal’ there is no normal out there!
Each family has its own squabbles, things that can’t be discussed or mentioned.
Now that I have spoken up in my family and mentioned the unmentionables, I see more "not" normal families.
It gives the matriarch of the family peace as she prays to keep her family together, for her children to get along, that there be peace and love, if only from her dreamlike view.
I have spoken to a few children who are unwilling to break their mothers hearts/dreams by mentioning the unmentionable.
Does silence make a family normal?
Or is it more normal to be not normal!
Silence allows the unmentionables to go unspoken, unacknowledged, but silence doesn’t make them disappear.
In fact their crimes seem to multiply over the years, the pile growing larger spreading beneath the prayers.
What is normal?
usual: conforming to the usual standard, type, or custom
- healthy: physically, mentally, and emotionally health
- occurring naturally: maintained or occurring in a natural state
How many natural state families are there? What is the standard we are to adhere to?
I am thinking ‘normal’ is like perfection, it is a pipe dream, a heaven to aspire to, but impossible to attain, and it mostly leaves you feeling left out and inept at being able to pull it off.
I had to look at the opposite of normal, abnormal.
-not normal, average, typical, or usual; deviating from a standard.
I am not sure I have met one family yet that occurred in a natural state.
I have admired the mamma duck waddle with her fuzzy yellow baby ducks wiggling behind her, quickly leading them away from me (danger). I marveled at the way she intuitively did this.
What happens in human families?
How do we get so far off course, where danger lives within our homes, where millions of little girls fall victim to abuse by the hands of their fathers, while their mother prays, “Let’s thank God, for all that we have and that we are all together.”
Abnormal to me are families where silence allows unmentionables to be, where we are taught not to mention the unmentionables, to live in a false place called normal.
Abnormal erodes away the normal children, until they too become abnormal.
How confusing this all gets, to strive to reach a natural state of occurring when abuse seemed more natural than real natural?
What if we didn’t have a normal spot to stand on, or an island of peace, a section of comfort, and a zone where we could sort out the natural from the natural abnormal?
It seems I was given natural unnatural love.
My unnatural attention hurt, yet I had to tell myself it was for my own good, that I deserved the hollering for mentioning the unmentionables, for not keeping the family balanced in an unbalanced way.
The cross-eyed way we had to look, while trying to pull off natural!
Normal is abnormal or so it seems to me.
Look around and listen to the undercurrents in families, the pretense and ‘don’t go there’ sentences attached to buttons that will implode and expose the ‘normal’ in the abnormal.
Unless you have been raised in a normal abnormal home, in a state where abnormal occurred always, you will not get this whole post.
My normal was abnormal and even trying to get back to normal would be abnormal, for how can someone who was raised abnormal ever be normal again.
Is there a rebirth?
Is there a moment where you get to be a virgin to normal?
Can you tell your natural state when it occurs?
Maybe more important, do you know abnormal?
