Fairfax, VA, USA. All human families are dysfunctional. Get over it. Your own personal narrative is nothing special.

No matter what a family may look like on the outside to the casual observer, inside it is most likely a mess. Kick the can the family lives in, god only knows what rough beast might wake.


Dysfunction doesn’t make you homosexual or force you to wear women’s clothes. Dysfunction doesn’t give you a right to go on welfare and complain that life is unfair. Dysfunction doesn’t grant you free gratis to attack those people and organizations you don’t like. Life can be tough, a long, often dreary slug. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or a charlatan trying to separate you from your money and your property.

Dysfunction is everywhere and excuses nothing

The Kennedys, the Lohans, the Clintons, the Roosevelts, the Nixons, the Ghandi’s, the Jacksons, the Kings — the Soprano’s don’t have a monopoly on conflict, disorder, and abuse.

The Huxtables can only exist on television or as a Sunday School Sermon.

Adolf Hitler, who bullied his sister (and ordered the Holocaust and committed other atrocities), could have blamed everything on a father who beat him.

A good lawyer might have gotten Adolf off on time served: it was all his father’s fault, don’t you know.Your family didn’t cause the problems you find so difficult, the ones you run from. Family ain’t the cause or the problem no matter how much psycho-expert research is published in the journals. There isn’t a therapist in the world who can solve your personal problems. An advanced degree in social sciences does not confer wisdom or common sense.

The answer is much closer than the internet and much more efficacious than prayer. Look in the mirror and then get over yourself. You’re nothing special, no matter how many gold stars your teachers may have awarded you.

Sorry. I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy and have learned through experience that happy endings seldom last. All of the king’s words and all of our cash can’t put Humpty back together again. You take your lumps, wipe your nose, and then move on. We are born and raised in a dysfunctional families and then we grow up. No longer a child, we put away childish things and become adults with dysfunctional families of our own.

I was born in a mid-size state capital a few years after World War II and several years before the Korean on the cusp of what came to be known as the Baby Boom. One leg is in the boomers, the other in the nameless generation that immediately preceded it.

My father was an Army veteran of the Chinese theater and, although not an unlettered provincial glove maker, was not what become known in the 1950’s as a white collar professional. The Great Depression forced him to drop out of college and earn money to help his family survive. He took a job as a radio engineer. A veteran amateur radio operator, he pursued his interests in the technical side of radio and television.

His mother had come west in a covered wagon. His line in America extends back before the American Revolution when the previously indentured ancestor made it to the new world. They were farmers and skilled tradesmen and sometimes teachers, generation after generation, living day to day and seldom rising above the lower classes.

My mother, a first generation Sicilian born in America, was a telephone operator back when Ma Bell used human hands to make connections. She was a middle child of three who always felt second best to her older, supposedly brighter sister. Her father, at seventeen, had left his family and the girl to whom he was engaged back in Palermo never to see them again. He quickly ended up fully employed in Chicago where he met my grandmother whose family had also recently arrived from Palermo.

My mother and father married as the war was starting and my father was overseas when my doomed older brother Robert was born with spinal bifida. Bobby lived less than a year. My mother watched him slowly die separated from my father who was still fighting a war. Their story is neither new nor unique and they both ended up, as did many, as unrecognized casualties of the war. Collateral damage engulfs the many, not just the combatants.

Post-war, my father was a hypertensive, chain smoking alcoholic, favoring cheap wine over the harder stuff. Looking back on it now, my mother, after a war and a dying baby, was psychologically damaged and emotionally demanding, only semi-stable on her worse days.

Post-war, my father continued to work in radio and then television when it arrived. He worked a rotating shift and I have few memories of him being home when I was young and awake. My most vivid memories, all from my very early teens onward, are of my father sitting half drunk at the dinner table. He was very bright man, smarter than I am I believe, one who possessed a world class brain. I seldom had a chance to know that man.

Even a good war takes many unintended casualties. We are what we are and must play the cards we are dealt, even when our available choices are not any we would freely choose if we had an alternative.

I was born transsexual. In a family that was culturally Roman Catholic Sicilian. It is not something I would choose or recommend to others. As girl born transsexual, I was sent to parochial grade school in dark brown corduroy and tan shirt like the boys were. I attended a boys Catholic high school post puberty. It is not something I would choose or recommend for a girl born transsexual.

My younger brother was born with a heart murmur. He thought there was a chance he would die before his thirtieth birthday. At sixty, the murmur cannot be found. He was the last child my parents had. He followed me through school, always being unconsciously compared to his older, supposedly brighter brother.

He shared a bedroom with me until he moved out during college. When I told him I was transsexual, his only words were well, that explains a lot. I was the best man at his wedding. He was my best man at mine. We made do with what we had.

My transsexuality is not something I would have chosen to burden him with when we were growing up. I would much prefer to have been his older sister but that path was not available to us.

All of us are born and raised in dysfunctional families. it’s nothing special. For good or bad, we are nothing without our families. I will leave you with an observation by the late George Carlin: The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment