Sitting in my chair and looking out at the courtyard I hear murmuring: Three generations of women over there—the young family who lives across the street in a different development, and the grandparents who live two doors down from me. The grandmother, mother, and daughter are talking in a group, and they are all laughing.
What’s wrong with that picture? It would never have happened in my family. My mother made everyone too tense and nervous. My grandmother picked up slights that didn’t exist. My sister lived in a fog.
I assumed that every family was like us. But then I began to see other families.
After we moved to Bainbridge Island, a former colleague of Nancy’s at Widener University School of Law, Jeff Moultrie, visited with his wife and two of their kids. They kidded each other, gently teasing, and no one got upset. They filled our living room with goodwill.
Jeff smiled in evident joy at his kids.
Kate, only a year and a half old, played with a simple puzzle on the floor, and when she missed something, Jeff’s wife smiled and pointed to provide her with a hint to fix it. Jeff, a former U.S. Attorney, told war stories and his children listened, rapt.
We have friends from law school one of whom goes back to Nancy’s childhood. Her friend, Lisa Zrull, went to the University of Virginia, and she and her graduate student teacher in German, Jim Saintsing, fell in mutual love. They married early in law school; Jim was in our law school class at Chapel Hill.
Then Jim and Nancy took jobs at the same firm in Greensboro, and I had a job down the street. They had three kids, a girl, Katie, and two boys, Andrew and Tom. After law school and our few years working together in Greensboro, Nancy and I left, but we’ve always come back to see the Saintsings. Someday, Jim and I will take a road trip! Hookers and blow!
All of this is to say that to spend time with the Saintsings and their kids is to be in domestic heaven. I mean this next statement as a compliment: Jim and Lisa are extremely smart, and people like that can be difficult to get along with. Not them. And their kids all love them and each other. The children, now high-achieving adults (an editor, an accountant, a Ph.D. biologist), are a joy to be around. If they have an internal conflict as siblings, they sure hide it well. Katie is our goddaughter, and Kate is Jim and Lisa’s. During a visit to Greensboro, Katie and Kate sat across the table from each other, and Katie immediately told Kate, “I love your glasses!” They were blue-framed.
When Nancy taught at Widener Law, she had a colleague, Barry Furrow, who was an expert on health law; he’s at Drexel now. His wife Donna is a linguist who writes children’s books and teaches at Swarthmore. Their kids are all admirable: a doctor, a vet, an intellectual property lawyer, a chef. Lots of brains in lots of fields. We gathered with them off and on, and the parents and kids got along so well and were so kind to each other.
And finally my old AIG colleague Tim Slattery and his wife Pat. They have two charming kids, Ian and Claire, both Stanford graduates. We spent a delightful lunch with them, and, as I would have expected with Tim and Pat anyway, it was hilarity, chaos, and affection.
It made me wonder. These families contradict the stereotype of the highly intelligent, high-strung, neurotic intellectuals who can’t function. You can take my word for it that they’re all calm, fun, easy-going, and kind.
Then there’s my family. Intellectually I don’t think we were on the level of the aforementioned domestic gangs, though my parents both had doctorates and were college professors, and my brother was an astrophysicist, I was a college English instructor and a lawyer, and my sister taught counselling and dance. But we were also wildly dysfunctional, and my siblings and I still are, and this is a psychiatric term, very fucked up.
My older brother Pete was afflicted with anxiety that the docs just couldn’t cure, and he descended into alcoholism before recovering. My sister lived in an impenetrable fog of false joy before developing severe dementia at 59. I’ve never seen anyone clearly and, until recently, I hated myself and believed that I was a failure.
My brother and I hated our mother—I was relieved when she died—while my sister was slavishly loyal to her but I think had anger about our father. Here's a fun irony: my parents were trained as educational psychologists, but my mother was a demonstrably terrible parent. My father, deprived by his father's early death of any kind of a role model, did the best he could, but I always felt like he struggled to do the right thing.
My mother complained that when we were a young family, her mother forced us, my parents and two siblings, to drive on every holiday to north central Pennsylvania to the small college town, Mansfield, where my great-grandfather and grandfather had been professors. Grandpa was retired by the time I met them, and I remember those holidays as being full of Christmas presents, roast beef, and the smell of my grandfather’s bourbon. Mom was apparently at wit’s end the whole time.
But I recall kindness: I crawled into my grandparents’ heavily blanketed bed and looked out the window at the snow. One morning there was a very blue bluebird standing on the white roof.
But my mother resented those visits, as she would have preferred to have holidays at home. Then we were also expected on occasion to drive east to see Dad’s family in the coal hills where his dad had been a coal miner and had died in 1918 of the Spanish flu. Visits to Dad’s family involved lots of cousins, noise, kindness, but a kind of strangling Catholic repression. They were all polite and seemed to enjoy each other, but there was a lot of church and not much fun.
After Pete and Ann got married, my mother demanded that they come back to Ft. Lauderdale, where we had moved, with their spouses for holidays. When they did, everyone suffered.
I cannot account for Ann’s husband, except that, putting together rumor and fact and what I know of him, he is an extremely non-functional adult. The two things I feel that I’m allowed to say is that he once charged to drive me from where they lived in southern New Hampshire to Logan Airport in Boston. Later, when my mother and I visited in Oregon after my father died, John would turn down the thermostat when he and Ann went out, though my mother and I were still there. I could write reams about his misbehavior over the 50 years and would do so even though he’s still alive because he dislikes me as much as I dislike him, and he wouldn’t read this anyway.
My brother’s wife was absolutely flummoxed by my mother. Here’s the only thing you need to know about that relationship: Penny had come to Ft. Lauderdale and was nearby when my grandmother said that Penny had a lovely figure, and Mom said, in Penny’s hearing, “I don’t know, she’s a little hippy.” Penny spent a lot of time in her bedroom on those visits, and Mom was upset that Penny wouldn’t involve herself in family activities. Really, you wonder why?
I don’t need to go on here: let’s just look at the crosswinds: we all hated John, Mom was confused by Penny, all of us were intimidated and set back on our heels by Mom, John and Penny hated each other, no idea what Ann thought of Penny, Dad REALLY hated John, and, at 15, I already wanted to drink. My dad simply ground his teeth. Who knows what complaints he had to bear from my mother behind closed doors.
There’s another post in which I have lunch with Mom (see “Lunch with Jeannette”, August 27, 2021), and after 30 years of this, she asks me, “Why does Penny hate me?”
Mom would play us off against each other. When I saw her, she’d tell me what Ann and Pete had achieved. Penny told me that once she reported to Mom that she’d been promoted, and Mom said, “Oh, George and Nancy will be the real money-makers.” As a result, we resented each other through most of our adult lives.
Mom was so unaware. Yet she had gone through the same history with her mother. Couldn’t she figure things out?
So I really had doubts about having my own family, which was one of the reasons that Kate wasn’t born till I was 48. (Also, having had mumps as a kid, I had few and lazy sperm.)
But when we did have Kate, I vowed: It fucking stops with me. My great-grandmother’s sins against my grandmother got passed on and on, but no more. That was it. I would NOT do that to Kate.
There were so many times when I started to say something to Kate, but then I’d think, no, no, Jeannette is NOT here. And I’d shut myself up.
Kate seems so well adjusted. I’ll remember back to what some umpire did to her, and she’ll say, “Dad, how many years ago was that? Let it go.”
Recently she and Nancy were going to Leavenworth in winter for an expensive weekend. I kidded them: “Oh, that sounds like a lot of money! I guess I’ll spend some this weekend, too.”
Kate tilted her head and asked, “What would that look like for you?”
Damn if that didn’t sound like the good-natured fun of the families I mentioned. Kate talks about wanting to end up near us. I dreaded every visit to my mother, and I felt nothing but relief when she died. If Kate doesn’t get into the London School of Economics for grad school, she’s mentioned coming back to UW, but I think she should go live her own life.
So maybe I did make it work. I told Nancy recently that I felt that I could die happy now: I had participated (Nancy did the best work) in helping to create a really superior, well-adjusted human being. Maybe after all of these generations of pain, I live with a happy family.
It's nice to see that you are on the road to a happy ending.