Tambourines, Sausage, Mardi Gras, and Rugby

     People have this idealized image of my family that is comical. Yes, my four daughters are good students and good people who have never broken the law (or at least haven't been caught yet) (or if they have been caught, they haven't called me for bail money), and I'm very proud of them, but we are also very, very human and we do stupid things all the time. We fight, we get on each other's nerves, we let each other down, we can be selfish, and we tease each other mercilessly.

     But for some reason, there are people who look at us and think we are The Brady Bunch and that we spend Friday nights doing family sing-alongs with the biggest argument being who gets to shake the tambourine (if that were the case, I would definitely call dibs on the tambourine). I am exceptionally lucky that my daughters enjoy spending time with each other and with Herbie and me. We are a close family and I talk to each of them several times a week. We spend major holidays together and try to schedule a fun family vacation every year. But all of that takes a lot of work and compromise, some mild cursing and hair-pulling, and usually some hurt feelings thrown into the mix. It's like sausage-making---if you only see the end result, it looks tasty, but the process to get there is anything but pretty. And more often than not, I'm the one squishing the meat into the machine.

     I called my sister-in-law N to tell her we would all be at my mother-in-law's party this weekend, including fiance E and longtime boyfriend T. She was thrilled to hear the news (No, really, she was.) She commented on what a fun, special couple C and E are and how excited she is about their wedding next year. I found myself wondering how she knew they were a fun, special couple since she has only met E once.  N answered the question I hadn't asked.

     "I follow C and E on Facebook and they are so cute together! I love reading the banter they have with their friends. So cute!"

      I'm a firm believer that Facebook is a wonderful tool for high school and college kids to share info and keep in touch. I know that all four of my daughters love Facebook. I reluctantly signed up myself, but only because the oldest one was trying to win a grant and the rules allowed you to cast an extra vote if you did it from your Facebook account. Since I signed up, several people from high school and college have contacted me through the account and that's fun. Others have contacted me because they like my books and that is fun, too. But other than that, I don't participate in Facebook. Sorry to those who I am friends with on there, but you already know I seldom update my status and am much better at answering emails or texts.

     If someone sends me a message, I answer it, and if every couple of months I have some news about the girls to share, I share it. That's all. I'm not friends with my daughters or their friends or my nieces and nephews. I don't want to read ramblings they have written after coming home from a party where "friend X" danced with "boy Y" and will forever after be known as "ex-friend who is the *&^%#$%^ skank of the dorm" or anything even close to that. I don't want to know that the sweet niece who helped me bake cookies when she was ten now swears like a trucker and has stacks of bead necklaces "earned" at Mardi Gras by flashing her boobs. The next time I hug my nephew at a family party, I don't want to remember that he "liked" a nude picture of some celebrity or bragged about chugging ten beers before vomiting in his mother's flower bed. Maybe my young family members are writing about joining the Peace Corps and ending world hunger, but I don't want to take any chances. By not reading their pages, I can continue to cling to the illusion (delusion?) that they are.

     So when my sister-in-law said she was reading C and E's conversations with their friends on Facebook, my first thought was, "Creeper!" As if again reading my mind, she said, "My kids tell me not to be a creeper, but I tell them that I'm not, C and E accepted my invitation to be friends so they must want me to know what's happening in their lives." Here's a quandary for you: Your aunt or uncle or neighbor makes a request to be added as a friend on Facebook or MySpace or whatever. Do you ignore the request so they can ask you in person why you haven't added them yet, or do you deny the request and face the awkwardness, or do you accept the request and then censor your page? C & E didn't want to be rude, so they accepted her request. And now she's creeping on them. And by extension, she's creeping on the rest of us.

     Because the next thing she said was, "I was looking through C's pictures and I saw that you guys went on a vacation to the Florida Keys this past June." Oh, yay. Now I'm wondering what pictures C put up of me in a bathing suit or scarfing seafood at some restaurant. Just as I'm wondering this, N says, "You guys are the perfect family. You and Herbie are such good parents and you all always look like you are having such fun together." I don't know about the "good parents" part, since I mostly think God took pity on Herbie and me when he saw how totally clueless we were and just gave us really, really easy kids, but the always having fun part is pretty true. We do manage to have fun wherever we go, even when things go majorly wrong, just because we are used to things going majorly wrong and we learned early on to find a way to laugh about it so we wouldn't go for each other's throats.

     N told me that she noticed pictures of us on a "nature walk" and how happy we all looked. Nature walk, nature walk, hmmm . . . I guess she was talking about the trek through the Everglades we took. It was about 97 degrees, but according to The Weather Channel, with the humidity added in, it felt like 105. We were all dripping with sweat, the bugs were eating us alive, some of us (and by that I mean mostly me) were terrified of the alligators along the trail, but of course when we stopped for pictures, we all smiled. Doesn't everyone do that? That doesn't mean that when the camera wasn't aimed at us, we weren't pushing each other to fight for the minuscule sections of shade to be found or hogging the coldest water bottle for ourself, or hoping the endless bugs were more attracted to the scent of someone else's blood supply than our own. I didn't hear any one of us say, "Here, I'll spray my body with sugar water so all the bugs will feast on me and you guys won't have to suffer a single itch."

     After seeing the pictures, N said, she woke her family up early on a Saturday morning and ordered them all into the car so they could take a "nature walk" in a nearby park and follow our example of being a happy family. Yikes. That's one sure way to make her family hate us. It didn't work out, though, she told me. Her family just wouldn't cooperate and complained the whole time--it was hot, they were tired, the bugs were biting them--and she finally gave up and let them escape back to the car where they apologized for being uncooperative. Really? That sounds exactly like our nature walk through the Everglades only no one apologized for complaining. Who would they apologize to since we were all complaining equally? I'm sure that if N had stopped her family on their walk to take some pictures, they would have all wiped the sweat and squished bugs from their faces and smiled broadly for the camera the same way we did. Viola! Happy family on nature walk.

     When the camera is back in the case, we are just like any other family I know. We laugh, we fight, we annoy each other, we take care of each other, and we share memories that no one else has. Anyone who is planning to wiggle their way into our close-knit bunch needs to understand that while we never hesitate to insult each other's hair or breath or intelligence, it is done with love. When I tease one of my daughters about being a bad driver or burning the macaroni and cheese, I'm really saying, "You are the light of my life," and when they make fun of me for using the wrong word or calling them by the wrong name, they aren't actually accusing me of being senile, they are saying, "I know there is nothing I can say or do that will make you stop loving me." Really.

     So for those foolish few who ignore all the warning signs and become one of us in the eyes of God and the legal system, you'll know that you've made it to the inner circle when we ask you to put your shoes back on because we'd rather smell the wet dogs. If we let you go first in the dinner line or smile politely when you lick your fingers and then reach back into the Doritos bag for more, you are still part of the viewing audience who only sees the 22 minutes-with-commercials, happy-endings-for-all, sitcom version of our family (yes, I'm talking about you, T. You are part of the family now, so I can tell you if that behavior continues, your snacking supplies and fingers are in danger of being cut off).

     You'll see the version where Marcia gets hit in the face with a football but ends up learning a lesson about vanity and inner beauty and the whole family shares a group hug before jumping in the station wagon for a trip to the green stamps store and maybe you prefer that, the way I prefer the blissful ignorance of reality that I enjoy by not friending nieces and nephews on Facebook. But if you want to see the behind-the-scenes version where Marcia tackles Jan to the floor over the last Oreo, Peter plays home videos of Greg on a potty chair for Greg's new girlfriend, and paper towels serve as markers for the cat vomit everyone claims to have not seen, you have work to do. Deliver a couple of clever insults that leave us with our mouths hanging open, then turn our tentative shots at you back on us without hesitation and you'll get your foot in the door. But once your foot's in, avoid the paper towels strewn about. Just pretend you don't see them like everyone else.

   

     P.S. Mike Brady is trapped in a collapsed building on Christmas Eve. Carol Brady stands outside the police barricade and worries. Suddenly, she lifts her voice (and the building, apparently) with a stirring Christmas carol and Mike stumbles out to freedom. Christmas and Mike are saved by the power of her voice. She'd be a handy chick to have around for say, mine collapses, earthquakes, and rugby scrums.