Off Topic: Every few years, I try to spend a few days with my aunt. I know that she gets hurt by my cavalier attitude towards her. So this week was the attempt for 2010-2015. I suppose I'll try again in 5 years.
There are three issues with my aunt, only one of which is interesting. The first is that she isn't very kind or empathetic. She can be generous, but she doesn't really think about how her behaviour will hit others. She wants to be smarter than me about everything and has a tendency to put down my experiences and knowledge. (She also gets angry and then dismissive when I talk about things she doesn't know and don't predict the limits of her knowledge. She was pissed that I talked about a friend getting in trouble at work for threatening to go to "H.R." She didn't know what HR was, thought it was rude that I would use an abbreviation that is obviously some West Coast slang that I should just know that no one else would know and then when I tried to explain it cut me off by saying "I really don't care." The second issue is that she gets into all sorts of conspiracy theories, so I just don't listen to her political ideas and that hurts her feelings terribly (even as she acknowledges that she never fact checks her own ideas).
The third issue though, I think, is interesting and that has to do with the role of women in families. I don't know if this is just my family, but I think it is possibly in many families. My aunt, like me, is a plump, single woman with a J.D. Once her younger brother (my father) was married, she was marginalized, and I felt the same thing happening in my own family. She has been very competitive with me, in ways that she will never win. (For example, she has never passed the bar and thus has never been able to work as a lawyer. I passed on the first try and got relatively stable work, although there have been hiccups. She is often trying to make her work as important as my work, and I'm sure on one level it is, but no one gets a JD to basically do paralegal work, and she's often putting me down as a way of lifting herself up). My family (my parents and siblings) is really the only family she has and there are times it feels like there's room for only one spinster in the family and so she is trying to dislodge me to claim that small space.
More importantly though, is that my dad, until recently, did not respect her. As a result, when he saw me doing things that reminded him of her, he drilled it out of me. I probably share a quarter of her DNA, but we definitely have things in common. However, while she revels in it, I do all I can to avoid those traits. For example, we both collect things and like stuff. I have an entire cabinet of the same pattern of china my Grandma had, and I use it all the time. I LOVE it. My aunt has 5 different kids of china, of her great grandmother's patterns and various others she has picked up along the way. They are stacked in the table in the guest room, all over the kitchen and in various places in the dining room. I have this incredibly strong reaction to this eccentricities, far more than a normal person would. In fact, my aunt drives me more crazy than just about anyone I know because so many of my similarities with her were drilled out of me with so much criticism. I put a lot of energy into policing my own behavior. I was honestly raised with her as an example of what not to be. I would probably be more like her if my dad hadn't been so critical of me. And here she is, blithely living her own life, as she should, not self-conscious about behavior I'd never allow in myself because it makes her happy. And it drives me crazy!
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