Be the Mist

"Fred and Rita drove from Harlingen
I can't remember how I'm kin to them
But when they tried to plug their motor home in
They blew our Christmas lights
Cousin David knew just what went wrong
So we all waited out on our front lawn
He threw a breaker and the lights came on
And we sang Silent Night, Oh Silent Night, Oh Holy Night"

- lyrics to "Merry Christmas from the Family", Robert Earl Keen

Each year I reflect that mid-December marks some sort of point of no return. By this week, every year, you have committed - your canoe is in whitewater, your roller coaster car is at the top of its arc, you're in your fifth month of pregnancy. The die is cast, your bed is made, the wheels are in motion, and my metaphors are numerous and inexhaustible. The season of family bonding is in full swing and unless you made some timely arrangements otherwise, having already reacquainted yourself with your family's particular flavor of dysfunction at Thanksgiving, you'll be enjoying a second wave of togetherness within the next two weeks.

While you do love your loved ones, you may have a certain amount of trepidation seeing your control-freak of a daughter-in-law twice in six weeks, or listening to your sister's boyfriend spend all of Christmas Eve trying to recruit you into joining Forum. Making holiday travel plans, shopping, cooking and preparing for guests is stressful enough without adding the sort of family interaction that makes you pray for sedatives even in the mellower months.

I give you permission to feel a bit tense.

It is a fact of life that people feel entitled to behave abominably while in the bosom of their families. Your relatives may have enough self-awareness to pass for "normal" in the outside world, but once they have their feet up on your coffee table, a different set of social dynamics takes over. Aunt Charlene probably has the good sense to keep her views in check at her office. But when she's sitting at your table, she may have no hesitation in flinging her disapproval at gay cousin Harry and his life-partner before the first platter is passed around.

If you doubt that there is an explosion of family-induced anxiety around the holidays, consider the sort of movies that are popular in December. A common story line shows a childless couple - maybe married, maybe not. Sometimes, they are plotting to find a way to discharge their family obligations while on their way to the airport bound for Bora Bora or Aspen. Usually, they are thwarted by the needs of their dysfunctional relatives and someone, typically the woman, gets covered with spit-up from the baby she is reluctantly holding. Sometimes, one person brings their significant other home to meet the family with disastrous results; sometimes, the person doesn't have any romantic prospects and either hires or fakes a companion to fool their family and deflect criticism regarding their unattached and unloved condition. Hilarity ensues.

Magazine and television therapists and newspaper lifestyle columnists, likewise, offer elaborate panaceas for keeping you off the ledge. They include making time for yourself by indulging in spa services or staying faithful to your exercise program. They all agree that you should get plenty of rest, eat sensibly and drink moderately. This is, of course, equally hilarious. There is no rest if your family, like mine, insists on talking to you through the bathroom door, or if drinking is the only thing to which you look forward. That sort of advice is only helpful if your stress level begins and ends with burning the Snickerdoodles...it does not extend to real familial psychological trench warfare.

I have never found holiday advice especially useful for two insurmountable reasons: the first being that you aren't holding any cards. My friend, Gio, says that your family knows how to push all of your buttons because they are the ones who installed those buttons in the first place and they will always know how and when to push as if by instinct. And, even more significant, the people in your life are just who they are. Making your own behavioral changes is very difficult for even a motivated person. Inducing OTHER adults to make behavioral changes is nearly impossible.

Oh, sure. You can try to outwit or outplay a relative. I have a family member, Otto, who is amazingly adept at ripping the bottle of wine or the bouquet of flowers out of your hands just before your hostess opens her door to find you standing there. Otto, then, presents the wine or the flowers with a flourish and modestly deflects her thanks for a gift he never purchased. You'd think that after all of these years I'd get a tighter grasp on my gift and give Otto an elbow to the solar plexus when he makes his predictable grab, but I forget from one year to the next and Otto is usually way ahead of me.

Believe that I have tried to shame Otto in every way I can imagine, but I tend to end up looking petty and in the end it has no effect. Otto is pretty content with getting credit where no credit is due, and doesn't have much motivation for change. His behavior is working out for him just fine.

Psychologists and family therapists who write Parade magazine pieces would have you believe changing the way you, the innocent party, interact with your difficult family members is the catalyst for a happy holiday. I believe that's terrible advice. I do not support a strategy in which difficult people are encouraged to become more difficult while their miserable relatives and coworkers invest even more effort to get them to play well with others.

Eventually, you just have to accept that what you identify as "dysfunctional behavior" is someone else's "functioning at optimum capacity." You can't do much more than swat Aunt Charlene down and tell her that she has to eat by herself in the kitchen until she's ready to be civil.

But, I do have strategies that got me through some of the most dysfunctional family holidays in human experience without getting on the evening news. I have survived Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings so weird and mismanaged that I have become enlightened just riding the karmic wheel of holiday gatherings.

How dysfunctional? When it comes to dysfunctional family stories, you can try and go toe to toe with me. But just a word of caution (and a string of mixed clich�s), unless you bring a lot to the table, I will lay you in the dust.

Do not even think that just because you had a Tanta who carried zip-loc baggies in her enormous handbag-slash-valise so she could denude a wedding buffet and cart off the catering that you have any advantage. Likewise, don't flatter yourself that having a cousin who only wears white in keeping with his religious sect or a stepfather who carefully styles his remaining six strands of hair into an elaborate comb-over represents anything more than just a smattering of eccentricity.

I have only one friend who sets the bar on "dysfunctional family" just a bit higher than my own. My family was at least the source of occasional entertainment - there was a certain amount of humor buried under the nuttiness. But when I met my friend's mother, the woman's hand was so frosty and limp to the touch that I recoiled. Later I asked, "Is your mother, in fact, actually alive? Have you checked?" The woman did not resemble a warm-blooded animal in either body temperature or animation.

But beyond my one friend, I don't meet many serious challenges to my status as having More-Idiosyncratic-Relatives-Than-Thou. To support my claim, I offer you a small portrait of one of my family's typically dysfunctional holiday dinners.

My father made his living working in the auto industry as an electrician. He had a license and belonged to the electrical workers' union, so someone somewhere along the line must have thought he was competent enough to hold an ohm meter. But by the time I came along, he seemed to have lost touch with some of the basics. I don't know how he kept himself alive in such a hazardous occupation, but he had a Mad Scientist's sort of preoccupation with making monsters by deconstructing innocuous household gadgets.

For starters, even simple devices like the television remote control never operated to his satisfaction. Dad always saw the greater potential inherent in every appliance and was eager to set it free. Each act of creation involved a fair bit of destruction and he was prone to cannibalizing one gizmo to provide parts for other inventions. This was problematic, because we were then bereft of the services of such useful things as the thermostat to operate the furnace.

But, this is also where my father's inventive genius really took wings. To compensate for disconnecting the thermostat, Dad wired a series of steam irons to make a floor heater. This was necessary, because he had already dismantled the floor heater, which is what led to the problem with Thanksgiving dinner circa 1980 - the year that he conceived of making a bar-b-que rotisserie from a portable electric floor heater and a small electric motor.

Now, the little glowing heater of that time was only designed to warm your toes and did not produce sufficient heat to roast an erratically rotating chicken (nowadays, George Foreman's cooking appliances seem to have enough power to run the Jacuzzi and roast a wildebeest simultaneously). But if you kept at it long enough, you could burn the outside while ensuring that the inside remained pink and wet. And, since you couldn't really carve a bird that was simultaneously charred and raw, Dad hacked it to bits with a pair of pruning shears before setting it on the table.

Sitting at this particular Thanksgiving dinner, hugging the bottle of Liebfraumilch tightly to my chest and dreaming of the year before when all I had to navigate was the loaf of fried Spam instead of the certainty of salmonella, I had a series of profound revelations.

Keep reading.

My mother had an entirely different flavor of dysfunction...she was disinclined to either procure or cook food. When she was young, there was very little to eat and although my grandmother could boil a few potatoes and throw a pickled herring on top, actual cooked meals were few and far between. While my mother loved to eat at any table other than her own, left to her own devices, she could live on cottage cheese, toast, carrots and pots of tepid tea.

Mom was also afraid of sharp things and heat, so her aversion to using knives or boiling water limited what she could achieve in the kitchen. What success she did have was hard won and she never developed any instincts about food. Most of us just know how long to fry bacon or when a pancake is ready to be turned - we don't consult any cooking instructions to know when pasta is done...it's done when it's done. My mother had no sense of this. Even heating a can of condensed tomato soup required careful reading of the directions and constant stirring at a low, low heat while courting the risk of setting the entire house on fire by turning on the stove in the first place.

Cooking made my mother nearly hysterical. She avoided it if at all possible.

You may be puzzling why I didn't just offer to cook myself. Or, maybe you don't relate at all to the dynamics of Gabriel Dysfunction and imagine I must be exaggerating. If you have searched your inner-database and not a single complimentary experience or memory has been flushed out, then we may have to admit that your family holidays have been more functional than not. It's ok. It happens. Some people have relatively tranquil family pods and while there may be petty annoyances or a burst of peculiar behavior exhibits itself now and again, members are congenial and actually look forward to spending time together. Don't be ashamed.

But, if you are from a dysfunctional family, you may already know that cooking a meal has nothing to do with making food or nurturing. It is, instead, a passive-aggressive act through which you demonstrate your unconscious desire to poison your family. The other members are wise to this and have developed all kinds of elaborate strategies to avoid eating the pile of raw chicken in front of them. My mother, for example, always claimed to be on a toast diet. My feint was to talk a lot and very fast, and I developed the trick of spooning food onto my plate while simultaneously scraping food from my plate back onto the platter, resulting in a cleaned plate every time.

Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic and chef, wrote an enlightening book on this very topic called "Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table". Reichl's mother fancied herself a budget gourmet cook, and she concocted her culinary creations almost entirely with spoiled foods she scavenged from anywhere expired food is thrown out. Her mother did not hesitate to cheerfully pick off the more obvious patches of mold and rot before serving her family and guests. The kids were on constant alert to sabotage their mom's dangerous inventions and forestall food poisoning.

Suffice it to say that in a lot of homes, the process of preparing food, eating and drinking brings a family face to face around the table, especially during the holidays. It is here where the public-self relaxes and the uncensored-self slips out of the gate. This is the best time of the year, therefore, to rekindle a lifetime of frustrations, stoke those old grievances and react, react, react.

Your dysfunctional family never changes. No they don't. Not ever. But you might.

Here's what I've got.

The holidays have an insidious subtext perpetuated by media and a collective mythology. That is, late December is the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. Even those of us who are suspicious of whether or not this is true, make some effort to participate with our culture. We chase an idea of peaceful family bonding that may elude us any other time of the year and those unrealistic expectations keep us spinning in circles and pulling out our own fur.

Once we start the spinning, it's hard to stop the spinning and regain our balance. The trick is to pull back and see it for what it is - just imperfect family life that has been set up to look unrealistically harmonious. Most families don't even come close, and if you come to accept that, you're likely to enjoy your relatives more.

Helpful tip number one is to dig deep for your sense of humor. This is a particularly valuable survival tool when you feel yourself being pulled into the family rip tide. If you can, sit back and try to give yourself up to the Family Holiday Variety Show that IS, and not dwell on your ideas of what you think it should be.

Secondly, try to recognize that it's not on your shoulders to make it right for everyone or do battle on behalf of others. You don't have to eat the chicken. You don't have to run interference between Harry and Charlene. Your friends and relatives are what they are and they have a perfect right to be as whacky as they please.

And, ultimately, use your family as a path by which to develop higher consciousness. In the martial art of Aikido, there is a philosophy of non-resistance. By moving with the momentum of an attack rather than against it, you disarm your attacker without violence. As they move at you, you step aside and let them rush past. The Buddha had a similar observation when he asked what would happen if you do not accept someone's gift of anger.

In my own family nest, I developed the habit of imagining myself as a mist - events just moved through and around me, but they didn't stick to me. I won't say I perfected this, but it was the sort of meditation that allowed me to stay in the moment and not go repeatedly screaming off into the night. I developed some equilibrium by just repeating my mantra over and over, "I am a mist. I am a mist."

Whenever you're around a less than functional social group (presuming you're not a player yourself), the temptation to get in the middle of the fray and do your magic is almost irresistible. You know how things should be and how people should behave. Who doesn't have a lexicon of good advice to dispense?

But, to quote Rocket J. Squirrel, "That trick never works." People kind of like how they are even if they are insufferable. You can have a cataclysmic confrontation or you can be the mist.

So, off you go. Stay in the moment, travel safe and may your dysfunctional holiday be very bright.

Note: "Merry Christmas from the Family" is the quintessential dysfunctional family Christmas song. Find the complete lyrics at www.cowboylyrics.com. Or, watch Robert perform it on YouTube by typing in "Robert Earl Keen Merry Christmas". He's a genius.

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Ingrid lives on San Juan Island.

While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane." Besides a passion for Tiki Studies, Ingrid is borderline biblio-obsessive. She is an old-school Libran - i.e., she won't be leading the Revolution, but she'll work to make it an attractive affair and hire the musicians and caterers."

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

editor@sanjuanislander.com

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