27 November 2007
Family Mythologies
“If
opportunity doesn’t knock, then you John Wayne the door.” Robert Standish
You can’t know a person by looking at them or reading their credentials. By college,
I felt world’s older than most of my peers. By age 25, I used to say, “I’ve
lived ten lives in one lifetime.” Since then, I’ve lived many more, and I’m
really just getting started. I suspect many other people share a version of
this sentiment.
The fact stands that there is no norm. That’s why most people feel like they
don’t fit in. There’s no “in” to fit into. Sure, there are some movies and
books and dogmas and so forth that try to paint pretty pictures of what a
person is supposed to be or do or say or look like, but it’s not real. And
those that try to fit into those molds know quite clearly that they’re faking
it.
I remember once, in high school, I was walking to the store and a man walked by
me and said with a sneer, “Are you as typical as you look?” After a few choice
explicatives audibly and artfully expressed, complete with finger gesture, I
thought to myself, “Buddy, you don’t know how hard I’ve worked to look this
typical.” I had put considerable effort into looking typical because I was
tired of not fitting in. It was humorous, even at that age, that someone
thought I was the norm, because my life had been anything but such. That
someone could think I was typical was a
laugh and a half. Looks truly are deceiving.
No-one is typical because there’s no such animal. Take me, for example. I’ve
been misdiagnosed by more people than I can shake a stick at. It used to baffle
me until I realized that you can’t sum up a person by looking at them. So to
expect others to know my history is silly. People have thought I was a jazz
lover at a time when I was into punk rock. People have thought I wanted to be a
lawyer just because I was one. People have thought I was conservative just
because I happen to like people who are conservative. People are wrong about me
all the time--much, much more often than they’re right.
I dare anyone to figure me out, and I dare anyone to figure anyone else out.
You can only get so far. For example, even though I’m a woman, I come from a
family with an over abundance of macho energy. You’d never know it from looking
at me. All that macho stuff is even in the name which was a sort of symbol in
itself growing up. According to the family mythology, Myles Standish was the
only guy on the Mayflower who wasn’t a Pilgrim. He was a mercenary hired by the
Pilgrims to protect them. And the military/macho tradition continutes to be
strong in my family. My brother and all my uncles were in the Navy. The family
is crammed full of contractors, loggers, truck drivers, mechanics, and
fisherman. There’s not an intellectual as far as the eye can see. Nor a liberal
(unless you count me, but that comes later along with some more mom-inspired
perspectives).
I double dog dare anyone to try to make a cliché out of any of us. When I asked
my sister to describe our upbringing, she said, “We were white trash, Samantha.
We were rednecks.” That’s perfectly true. Sort of. My dad is better read than
most college professors and knows the law backward and forward. He was sued
often during his career as a contractor, and I think it was pure fun for him
because he loved to learn the subtleties and loopholes in the law. Suing or
being sued was an excuse to dive into a more intellectual area of life.
Certainly, he knew more than most of his lawyers. He knew more than I did after
law school.
My dad is a gun toting Republican, a veteran who was in Cambodia before the
Vietnam war was official (one of his favorite sayings when anyone mentioned
that anything was at stake was to say, “What are they going to do, kill me?”
and then he’d throw his head back and laugh as if he thought that was the
greatest joke in the world). He’s got enough shrappenal in his body to set off
metal detectors, and he’s killed people. Yet, he’s got a strong sense of
justice, has a fascination with literature and new ideas, loved his kids
unconditionally and believed in socialized medicine. He’s a Christian who wears
the Star of David because, as he put it once, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to
wear the instrument of my savior’s death around my neck [the cross].” I ask
you, how does that fit any particular stereotype?
My dad and I used to go tooth and neck into politics. We made a lot of people
uncomfortable. We’d argue like a sonofabitch at the dinner table. We loved to
pit ourselves against each other, to see how well we could decimate the other
person’s arguments without getting personal about it. There was never
animosity. We argued believing it was our personal right to express ourselves.
It trained me well because my father had a mind that was matched by few. Devious,
cunning, sharp and complex. I learned that to stereotype a person was the mark
of an inferior mind. People cannot be so easily boxed.
There have certainly been times when I’ve tried to catch my father being a
bigot becaue it fit the liberal rhetoric. Like the time we had a storm when I
was in Junior High School, and a tree fell on our property. My brother, who was
younger than me by two years, was given the chain saw. He cut up the tree while
my sister and I loaded it into the truck. We had to drag the wood up the bank
of a creek, trek it across a bridge and throw it into the bed of the truck. At
one point, I said to my dad, “Why does he get the fun job while we have to do
all the work!” You couldn’t say anything more insulting to my father than accuse
him of being unfair. He got that dangerous look in his eye tempered by a slight
sparkle (after all, another one of his favorite sayings was, “Payback is a
bitch”), and said, “You want to cut up the tree?” And I got excited and said,
“Yes!”
My brother was, at the time, this stocky bundle of muscle. I was this tall,
skinny thing. I was feeling very smug. I took the chain saw. My dad showed me
how to use it, how to hold it so that you don’t slice your legs, and so that
you don’t kill yourself if the blade hits a knot in the tree and kicks up. I
was off and running, in seventh heaven really. For about the first hour. Then I
started to feel it. My muscles began to shake. My stance wasn’t quite so
stately and firm. But I was determined to show my dad that a girl could cut up
a redwood as easily as a boy. Until I
couldn’t lift the chain saw. I finally had to concede defeat before the tree
was finished.
With an “I told you so,” look in his eye, my dad said, “So, you think I play
favorites, do you? So, you think it’s easier to cut up the tree than to lug the
wood?” And I had to yell (yes, I did), “Okay, you win! I was wrong!” He smiled
a cat-got-the-canary smile. We both loved every minute of it—challenging each
other like that. Sometimes he won, and sometimes I won.
My dad had his own sense of justice, and it wasn’t what most people were
spouting. When we’d go to the supermarket, he’d say, “Meat does not come from
the store. It comes from animals. An animal had to give up its life for you to
eat.” He hated hypocrites, people who were against fur, for example, who ate
meat. That was one thing. It was quite another when we raised rabbits for
restaurants. The lesson became three dimensional for me. At first, I thought it
was great. I loved the rabbits. They were so furry and cute. Then it came time
to slaughter them. My father had this philosophy that an animal should never
know what hit it. There should be no pain. Out came the crowbar, and with one
move the beautiful bunny rabbit was dead. My brother and sister handled all of
that pretty well. I was surprised, really. My sister was four years younger
than me, and I expected her to kick up a fit. But she didn’t. We had to skin
and gut the animals. I tried my best to go along, but the warmth of their
bodies, the smell, the sound they made before they were killed, it was too much
for me. Before long, I was outside of the barn on the grass wretching.
My dad finally came over to me and said, “What’s the matter?”
I said, “I can’t do it? I just can’t do it.”
He could have been an asshole about the situation, but he wasn’t. He said, “You
don’t have to help, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to be a hypocrite about
it. If you don’t get in there and help, then you’re not going to eat meat.”
I perked right up, and said, “I don’t’ have to help if I give up meat?”
And he said, “That’s right.” I don’t think he believed I’d ever give up meat.
Little did he know me.
I said, “Deal! I’ll never eat meat again!”
I kept my word cheerfully. “Pass the mashed potatoes! Pass the salad!” I’d say
with a big smile on my face at the dinner table. I didn’t eat meat, quite
happily, until a few months later when my parents realized that I was serious,
and then they not only lifted the ban, but they made me eat meat even after I
protested that I really wanted to keep my word. I later became a vegetarian
anyways because the message stuck. I didn’t want an animal to give up its life
for me. Yet, I would never say that it’s wrong for another person to eat meat.
Even if that person happens to be a hypocrite about it. I have a different
philosophy, you see and it’s this: to each his own.
But I learned that from my family. Family mythologies don’t define you. They’re
a context from which you can view life. I’ve had my fair share of traumas and terrors,
some of which I’ll share and some of which I won’t. But none of them really matter.
They’re simply stories. They’re experiences. They’re a perspective from which
to develop your own stories and your own experiences. None of them are wrong,
and none of them are right. All of them are helpful, however. All of them have
meaning. All of them point the way because all of them help you see which door
you want to John Wayne, and most likely it’s one that’s not part of the family
mythology or the mythology of your friends, lovers, peers or culture at large.
My bet is that it’s your own door to your own treasures.
Through all of your personal experiences, certainly through all of my own, you
begin to see your own door, and it has been waiting for you all along. Whether
you John Wayne it or just turn the handle, it’s worth a look to see what’s on
the other side. There have been clues all along the way, and the contents are
nothing that anyone can possibly guess.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.