It's a mad, mad world...

 

I actually think the world is probably not any madder than it has always been.  We tend to forget past madness when faced with new madness. Though it is not really new madness, just more madness. 

I stopped believing in normal long ago. Normal tends to be a myth. It is a Norman Rockwell portrait of a two-dimensional world that doesn't exist. What makes us unhappy is that we think it does and we and our family are the only ones that don't fit into it.  Now that is madness. 

I grew up thinking my family was normal. As I grew older and had friends and eventually had a girlfriend, I experienced their families. At first I thought my family was just weird, but then I realized each of my friend's and my girlfriend's families were weird and dysfunctional too in their own unique fashion. Families can only build on the traditions and experiences of the parents who built their traditions and experiences on their parents. It is a very Frank Herbert Dunesque concept (if you have read the books and not just watched the movies). The main character goes through a spice/drug induced experience that gives him the memories of all the ancestors before him.  Having dabbled in genealogy, that's a pretty mind-boggling number of ancestors.  But it illustrates why most people's families are pretty fucked up.

I have tried not to mess my own children up and impose too much of the weirdness of my background on them. Many parents try to no avail to do the same thing. And my own children have never really expressed any interest in my childhood, interests or occupation and I do my best not to force that information on them. It leaves me with an empty feeling at times. But I want my children to have their own lives based on their own choices. You can lead a horse to water.

Ironically, I was interested in my parents lives and interests.  I gleaned as much as I could from stories, mainly on long road trips and vacations. But they never really wanted to sit down and share details. I tried when I was older and had a degree in Journalism. I even tried interviewing them on tape.  Either I had waited too long to ask or they had no desire to remember.  My mother had a great deal to shut out and my father was always a bit oblivious. There wasn't much on either side of the family tree to ground our own family in any sense of normalcy. I had more than my share of crazy grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

I guess the nuts never fall far from the tree.