Dysfunction junction

When you come from a dysfunctional background, your judgement and perception of behaviors is often skewed. Behaviors that occurred as a matter of course in your life and that just seemed "normal" to you, not necessarily kind or nice, but not out of the norm. Its only when you start to have other comparative experiences, get to know the way other families behave that you (hopefully!) see it for what it is and break out of a pattern. For example, when I lived in Manhattan years ago, my father would drive up from Florida to visit his relatives in Rockland County (just north of NYC). He would never drive into Manhattan to pick me up, rather he would have me take the subway to the end of the line in the Bronx, stand on the cross-Bronx expressway, and pick me up on his way. I am embarrassed to say I didn't think twice about this. It was only when I mentioned it casually to someone who reacted with horror, that I stopped and really thought about it. Even then, I had to mention it to another person as sort of a test to see their reaction. Pretty much the same. I stopped standing on the highway. He still wouldn't pick me up, but I stopped standing on the highway.

So, years of therapy later, I have a little situation that gives me some pause, but not until later do I really react as I should have.

Over the summer my mother was up from Florida and wanted to visit her nephew. So we rented a car and drove upstate. Present were my cousin and his wife, his daughter, her husband and their two small children(my cousin is only about 9 years younger than my mother), and his deceased son's widow and her young daughter, and my cousin's sister-in-law. I hadn't seen them since about 2 months before Adam came home, at their son's wake and funeral.

The day was more pleasant than I thought it would be -- my cousin is a doctor, and very much into the ego thing of being a doctor. He's also a Marine, conservative, sexist -- well, we just don't have much in common. I tried to avoid spending much time with them as the whole family setup was very dysfunctional and uncomfortable for me. The wife drank heavily. There was some weird emotional triangle between my cousin, his wife, and the sister-in-law, who moved in with them when she was about 12 years old and is still there -- 25-30 years later. Just not comfortable.

The untimely death of their son, early 30s, seemingly completely healthy, with a wife and young baby, of a heart attack, has wrought some changes that made the situation much more tolerable. So, the day was pleasant, everyone was kind to Adam, but something nagged at me. They had never met Adam and asked not one question about him. Not one question about the adoption itself, the trip to Vietnam, how I had adjusted, how he had adjusted. Nothing. And it bothered me. I mentioned it to my mother, who got angry. She had never recognized the dysfunction of the whole situation, thought I focused too much on it. So I sort of let it go.

Last week, we were in the pediatrician's waiting room and Adam was playing with a younger baby. His mother asked me where he was from and when I told her Vietnam, asked me a million questions -- about adoption, about Vietnam, about how he was adjusting, about how I was adjusting, about how it was being a single mother....and it brought this summer visit to my mind. So, which situation was normal? Family not asking a single question about the single most important experience in my life or expressing much interest in my son? Or a total stranger asking me every question under the sun? I'm going with the kindness of strangers.