Family Vacation
Posted by: lucie | From: June 26, 2007
Okay, so families are all different. In some families, brothers and sisters are physically affectionate with each other to a degree that I find creepy. My boyfriend is in one of those families. We obviously have vastly differing ideas of what is normal brother/sister behaviour. So... that is all there is to it. I will get to watch him put his hand on her knee and stick his face a centimeter away from her face and touch her a lot, which seems totally weird, and I will try not to be too freaked out, and in two weeks she and her husband will go home and life will go on.
We did talk about it, awkward conversation though it was. He said maybe they were a bit different from other brothers and sisters because of their situation growing up. Their dad was never around and their mom was an alcoholic who used to leave them in the car when she went into the bar to drink, so they kind of fended for themselves and took care of each other. That's how it was from the time he was eight and she was five, he says, and you have a lot of physical contact with kids that age. It still seems like you'd outgrow that physical relationship, but I guess it's not my place to judge.
Never think you have already seen all of the general categories of relationship weirdness, because there are always more that you haven't thought of.
The two week family vacation was probably not the brightest idea. It was not particularly carefully considered, but there wasn't much to evaluate - they were only going to be here once, and we couldn't afford to take a separate trip by ourselves, so there you go. In or out.
Here's the worrying thing, besides the snuggly sibling component: the sister and brother in law are from a small town in the most sparsely populated state in the US. This is their first time out of the country. They seldom leave their own small town. They don't know why he left, and are probably not particularly happy that he felt he needed more than their part of the world had to offer. The three of them are close, but seem to stick with small talk, which is alien to me. "Simple stuff," the boyfriend replies when I ask him what he usually speaks with them about. "Is that because that's all they want to talk about, or because you've never tried to talk about anything else?" I ask him. He doesn't know but supposes he hasn't tried particularly hard. "They're kind of rednecks, honey," he reminds me, which seems rude, but hard to deny when they make comments about someone "Jewing" someone on a business deal, or talk about hanging out at strip clubs, which is apparently one of their main forms of entertainment. I sound like a city-girl snob, I guess. But you should hear the way the boyfriend talks, and he loves them.
The boyfriend says he feels between two worlds and is a bit self conscious about them seeing him as having changed. Yesterday this tension resulted in him being incredibly bad at acknowledging my existence at all. I have no idea how I'm going to fit in. And you know how it is meeting family. Even if you're an independent, standalone kind of girl, you don't want to feel like people would prefer that you weren't around.
I kind of suck at small talk. It feels false and starts to drive me crazy if it goes on for too long. And even some stuff that I would consider smalltalky can end up in awkwardness. For example, yesterday the brother in law noticed the Scottish flag and asked if there was another flag that looked like it. I said yes, I think the the Finnish flag has a blue cross instead of the blue "x," then wondered aloud if it was actually white on blue, not blue on white. The brother in law said he thought maybe it was white on blue, at which point the sister asked him pointedly, "When did you get so full of knowledge?" (His response: "Playing the in-flight trivia on the way over.")
The boyfriend, who actually left the small town six years ago to move to the closest significant-sized city one state over, talked a lot at the beginning of the year about how his background affected the way he approached people - namely that in a small town like his, it was not a good idea to act like you were smarter than anyone else. Or smart at all. My background is totally different. The people I grew up with, went to school with, and have surrounded myself with ever since, like to enjoy their brains, think, reflect. We like to talk about new things, learn stuff, speculate, look up words in the dictionary and look up flags on Google image search. We like to solve problems and riddles and figure stuff out. We correct each other when we get confused, because that is how we learn things, and no one takes it the wrong way if you say "My brother went to Spain and Barcelona," and you said "Oh, actually Barcelona is a city in Spain," because then they know, and it's nice to know things. With this group, someone says someone went to Spain and Barcelona and then there are a couple beats of uncomfortable silence before the conversation moves on. It's just weird to be in a social situation where your whole way of approaching discussion in general is... rude, I guess. Where showing that you know anything someone else doesn't know makes you a know-it-all.
Well, I guess "know-it-all" is relative. Maybe this will be a good opportunity to improve by diplomacy and learn to make small talk a bit better. It's sunny out today. My toes are a little cold, though. This Coca Cola Zero seems to taste the same as Diet Coke. Music is cool. I like things that are blue.
Comparing the flavors (or flavours) of Coke Zero and Diet Coke is not small talk! :) That's an amazing conversation. You can ask about what their local house brand of Soda is at their local super-market, compare various sodas and cola as you travel around, look at the ingrediants and try to find soda with real cane sugar instead of corn syrup... Cola could be your salvation in the next two weeks!
Posted by: Mikey at June 26, 2007 9:10 AM