Fun Family — Nov. 1, 2022

John Agliata

7 months ago

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Family Dynamics 👪
New Mattress 🛏️
To Share Or Not To Share? ❓

Let’s say the only cracker you’ve ever eaten is a Saltine. You have no experience with any other crackers. In fact, you don’t even know that there is such a thing as other crackers. You might not love the Saltine, but you’re not going to really hate it either because you don’t know there’s anything better.

Such is the case with families, for some people. If you grow up surrounded by a certain family dynamic, you’re not going to know whether that family dynamic is good or bad. You’re not going to know if what you grew up seeing is normal or even healthy. Only when you broaden your horizons a bit and start purposefully looking at other people’s family dynamics can you make a value judgment on your own.

Last night after work, I went to a Halloween party at the home of a friend of Wifey Poo’s and Boy the Younger’s. I’ve met these folks before and knew they were Good People, but I don’t really know them super well and they don’t know me either. It was super kind of them to invite my family to this party, as it was made up largely of family.

What I did know of the families at the heart of this party is this: Between the two sisters whose children BTY plays with and Wifey Poo enjoying hanging with at homeschool stuff, they’ve brought into this world a lot kids. I’m talking, like, hella kids. Missy has nine, the youngest entering the world earlier this year. Jen has five or six. This isn’t a rare thing for homeschool families. I’m not sure exactly why that is, but it’s a truth. If you go to a homeschool event, you’re gonna see at least one conversion van arrive and kids spill forth like clowns from a circus car.

I’m becoming a new person when it comes to social events. These days, I’m much more at ease and comfortable in my own skin. That translates well in these types of situations. I’m able to just kick back and enjoy myself. And what wasn’t to enjoy about last night? The weather was gorgeous for a fall evening. There were not one but two kinds of chili, along with a host of Halloween-themed foods. And there was hot apple cider, which happens to be a personal fall favorite.

There also were, as I mentioned, hella kids, all decked out in various costumes — from Shelby the MMA fighter to a group of cowboys/cowgirls and BTY The Rubix Cube, which makes sense, as he’s down to being able to solve that thing in, like, 20 seconds, no joke.

It was so, so, so cool kicking back and watching the family dynamics. There was so much love among everyone there … the two sisters and two of their brothers, the associated spouses and the hella kids running around in various packs. Grandma and Grandpa made an appearance, which was a big deal because Grandma is going through chemo for a return of her cancer, yet she was in tremendous spirits and exceptionally friendly to the strangers in us who were seated around the fire pit.

It just felt good.

As I said, it’s hard to know what is more typical and what’s good in family dynamics until you are mindful of those beyond your own. Mine? I’ve learned in recent years just how dysfunctional it was/is, despite all outward appearances. If there’s one word to mark my family dynamic, it’s most definitely, 1,000% summed up by “drama.” My sister and I don’t speak, which might make sense when you know my mother and her sister didn’t speak for more than a decade because of some stupid perceived slight while my aunt was in the ICU after open heart surgery. Yeah, that can happen.

Dysfunction runs deep and spreads wide in my family tree. Down this branch are two brothers who don’t talk. Down that branch is a mother who dumped her daughter off with relatives for years so she could go out and live the 1920s flapper life. It’s all just … ugly and unnecessary.

Last night, I saw a family that was not that. I’m sure there’s stuff that isn’t exactly pleasant. What family doesn’t have something? But it was so refreshing to be among calm and judgment-free love and acceptance. I saw brother hugging brother, grandkids hugging grandma, sister-in-law talking with sister-in-law, baby being passed around to be loved on by any willing arms.

Like I said, it was good and fun to be a part of.

family

I’ve now slept for two nights on the first new mattress I’ve ever purchased with my own money, and I must say, it’s freaking delightful. We went mattress shopping a few weeks back (an adventure in its own right) with one mission in mind: Softer.

The frame arrived a few days after that trip, and the mattress showed up on our doorstep last week rolled up into an impossibly small box for a king-sized thing. Wifey Poo and I love each other deeply, but we also love lots of real estate when we’re asleep.

Sunday, we got the old bed out of our room, and I put together the frame for the new one — nothing more than a few screws. Then, we unpacked the mattress and removed it from the vacuum-sealed packaging. It immediately began to fluff up. Vacuum sealing is something akin to black magic, I believe.

By that night, we had our new bed set up with fresh sheets, and I was ready. Our previous bed was very high and very firm. You kinda hopped up to get on it and then just bounced on top of it when your butt hit. The new bed is what others would consider normal and what Wifey Poo and I, for now, consider low. And when you sit on it, you don’t bounce. You sink. It’s wonderful.

The first two nights of sleep have been great. The bed sort of wraps around me like a cocoon. My back actually doesn’t hurt when I wake up.

When you get to be my age, it’s things like this that get you excited.

mattress

I learned long ago that if I have the urge to write something, I need to just freaking write it and get it out of my system. There was a time when I’d fight that urge if the topic was challenging or dealt with a place I didn’t want to go. All that led to was restless nights and a general unsettledness until I finally just wrote what I needed to write.

I recently started feeling the urge to write my mental health story, and boy howdy, is it an ugly one. Rather than fight it, I wrote it. More than 7,100 words later, the first draft is done, and I’ll tell you, I’m scared to death.

Here’s the truth: I don’t know that anyone cares to read this story. I don’t know that it means anything to anyone else but me. What I do know is that publicly sharing this stuff is dangerous. I’ve experienced firsthand the strong, ugly workplace discrimination at a previous employer because I was open about my pursuit of brain health improvements. I used to thing that my job was to be a stigma-fighter, a person to let it be known that just because the illness I was battling was in the brain didn’t make it anything different from my colleagues who were dealing with heart or kidney issues.

The truth, though, is that to many people, it is different, and they’re going to treat you differently because of it, no matter what the company rhetoric is about its EAP plan or work/life balance or mental health benefits. That’s all bullshit when you end up with a supervisor and management that supports discrimination instead of conversation and understanding.

If that weren’t scary enough, man, I gotta say … this story is ugly. U-G-L-Y. It’s tentative titled “Thirty Years in Hell,” if that gives you any indication, and while I believe it has a happy ending right now, that doesn’t mean the road to that destination was filled with much beyond heartache and pain for a lot of people in my life. The story most definitely has landmines liable to make my aforementioned family dynamic even more challenging, which doesn’t mean it’s a story not worth sharing, but does lead me to pause.

So if you’re in my shoes, do you share that story? If you do, how and where? If you don’t, is it enough to just have written it, regardless of who sees it?

I’ll wrestle with these questions for a bit and see what happens.

mental health

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