Day 364 - My Assignment 2: Family

Dudrey Court beauties

I loved growing up in a neighborhood full of kids about my age. And I loved having so many cousins. There seemed to be so many relatives that I had a hard time reconciling that some people we used to drop in on didn't fit into the relative category. They were called friends, like Ruby and Stanley in Fargo. But even they seemed to be connected to the concept of family and relatives because they were from Hawley or Hitterdal.

I loved all the family reunions we seemed to go to several times each summer. Even if the range of relatives extended beyond those we saw often, there was comfort in knowing we were all related. Remembering this has probably helped me when I moved to places in the Middle East where clan and tribe are still strong ties among the community.

At the same time as I had all these positive feelings based on being part of a family, I didn't want my world limited to the scope of my extended family. I wanted to see more and get to know people whose lives followed unfamiliar paths. So my moves to California and then Iran and Romania came with efforts to recreate a family from the friends I met in those locations. My lack of success in marriage to both Don and John may have been in part because I wasn't able to reconcile being part of a couple with my desire to be surrounded by a larger family at the same time. Both Don and John were trying to separate themselves from their families while I was trying to extend mine. Don once told me I had to choose between him and my family. John used me as the excuse for his withdrawal from his family. Neither offered a very auspicious beginning for forming a new family unit.

Part of my Tehran family

The "family" that I acquired in Tehran was both most unusual and most intense. Of the 25 of us in the University of Southern California English teaching program, about half became close enough to celebrate all holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries together -- all the things that I had associated with family events. And because doing anything in Iran was just a little bit more complicated than anywhere else, we also had the bonding experience of having overcome obstacles together. We didn't just have to stuff and cook a turkey for Thanksgiving, for example. We also had to finish plucking the feathers from it the night before. So Thanksgiving became a 3-day holiday: Wednesday we got together with bottles of wine and conversation as we surrounded the bird and plucked or burned the last of the feathers off. Thursday we prepared and ate the meal. This meant mashing potatoes for 15 with just a fork and making squash pies in place of pumpkin pies. And Friday we got together again to finish off the leftovers.

My birthday dinner

Even going out to a restaurant wasn't a simple matter. We celebrated my birthday one year by going to the Polynesian restaurant in one of the city's big hotel. They had a special show that week so in addition to good food -- and wine again -- we also were entertained by musicians from Hawaii who dragged several of us onto the stage to learn the hula. At the end of the meal, the bill came. We knew the bill would be higher than usual, but it was really high: so high that one of our group took a close look at the details and he found there were significant discrepancies in the amounts for the same items: a few extra zeros had been added here and there. But even more surprising was the fact that the grand total at the bottom didn't match the result of adding up the individual amounts -- and the bill was done on an electronic cash register, not by hand. We pointed out the discrepancies and asked for a corrected bill. Instead of a new bill, we got a condescending lecture from the restaurant manager who pointed out that the cash register they were using was an American brand, so how could we possibly question its accuracy. The director of our program offered to leave his American Express card with the restaurant as our assurance that we would pay the bill, but only after we had received a corrected version. The manager refused that option but said he would straighten out the bill and contact us later. For the next year, the couple who had made our reservations received a monthly phone call from the hotel to ask us to pay the bill. But the restaurant never produced a corrected bill. The last phone call came when the couple was out of the country on leave and I was staying in their house. I answered the call and told the hotel that Neal and Shirley were out of the country, but they would be back in a week. The hotel never called again. So the 15 of us had a very handsome time, probably paid for by all the other patrons at other tables who were likely similarly scammed by the operator of the American cash register.

With challenges like that facing us every week, the bonds we developed were very strong. Thirty years after our Iranian adventures, I went to California to celebrate the summer solstice (a tradition that one couple introduced to all of us during our days in Tehran) with several of that group and we all agreed that none of us had ever found a similar work environment again.

Gayle

Life in Romania was much the same. One of the elementary school teachers in Bucharest, Gayle, became the central character in the lives of many of us there. Whenever I made my way from Iasi to Bucharest, I stayed at Gayle's. And every Sunday evening I was there, Gayle and Roger (now her husband) and I would cook dinner for anywhere from 8 to 16 people -- as close to the tradition of family reunions as I had come since moving from Minnesota nearly 10 years before. Is it all that surprising that I misread the signs of John's attitude toward family in that environment?

After marriage to John, I think I had expected that we would continue to have the kinds of frequent gatherings of family members and friends but this time in the U.S. with my family or in Canada with his. Slowly I began to realize, however, that my role in the relationship had shifted. Before the wedding, I was outside his family which put me in the position of being his ear as he complained about how overbearing his aunt was, how domineering both his father and grandfather were, how backward his mother was. He had very little respect for any of the women in his family: his grandmother let his grandfather walk all over her, his sister allowed his parents to arrange her marriage. He resented the fact that his aunt had attended parent/teacher conferences in place of his parents because they didn't speak much English. And suddenly, after the wedding, I was also just another female relative. With no positive models of how to relate to a female relative, he fell into the patterns he was familiar with -- and I therefore deserved no respect.

When I finally realized how many internal conflicts he had with the many members of his family, I decided the only way I could hope to maintain our relationship was to make a commitment to myself that I not have children. As much as John loved other people's kids, I could not risk putting a child in the position of having to deal with his anger, especially if the child were a daughter. But as much as I was convinced this decision was necessary for our marriage to work, it was also probably the decision that led John to realize he no longer wanted to be married.

The years between the end of my marriage to John and my meeting Alex were often filled with thoughts of guilt about my selfish life choices. I often wondered if my choices were evidence that I was running away from or avoiding something. I hope that I will eventually accept that my choices have been moving toward, not away from, something. Those choices eventually led me to Qatar and therefore to Alex and Simon. And finally my life-partner choice fits with my image of, and my need for, family. So, even if selfishness was a factor, even if I might have been just a bit looking to escape from something, Alex has brought me back to a place I want to be -- inside a family every day, not ever feeling like I'm on the outside, always able to look in.