Family

When we grow up, we naturally assume that all families in the world function as our own does, that all people act like the adults in our lives. We think that what we know is the right way to do things. When I was younger, the term "dysfunctional family" was a remote concept. It applied to The Simpsons and soap operas. It never applied to any family I knew, especially not my own.

I no longer labour under that mistaken impression. Now, as an adult, I can see the dysfunction.

I could write a book about the mentality of the Family-At-Large, but I just want to concentrate on one today: that attendance is compulsory for all family get togethers.

Sickness and work commitments are begrudgingly accepted as excuses for absence, but apart from that you are expected to be present and to enjoy yourself. As part of this "compulsory attendance" rule comes the rule whereby it is impossible for anyone to set a date for a get together without extensive consultation with everyone else to ensure that everyone can make it. I seem to be the only one who doesn't feel the need to ask all and sundry for permission to hold my birthday lunch on the day and time that I want. Last year I elected a date, time and place and let everyone know. I was then harangued on multiple fronts by people telling me "if you have it on a Saturday then this person can't make it." But if I held it on a Sunday then two or three others couldn't make it, and to be frank, I wanted the others to come more than the one who can't make a Saturday.

Because it is a family event, and (at least in the FAL's mind) family is the most important thing there is, you are expected to drop everything and go. The most vocal proponent of this is the Uncle who left his own wife and children for another woman.

In a (misguided) attempt to welcome the woman into the FAL, people are bending over backwards to schedule events so that she can come, and since she works on a Saturday, nearly every event has been on a Sunday for the last few years, often to the detriment of his own children.

This Sunday we will be celebrating 'Family Day' - to mark the anniversary of my grandfather's escape from a communist country and passage to Australia. It has been scheduled for a Sunday primarily so that she can make it. They seem to have disregarded the fact that Sundays are difficult for many people, my cousins, mother and myself included. But yet we are still expected to attend.

This year I won't be going, because I feel so wretched on account of the medicine mix-up. I told my sister that I didn't think I could make it and she said to me "you should at least try, for Grandpa's sake." This exemplifies the FAL mindset - that if I cannot make it to an event, I am not trying hard enough and therefore it becomes personal. The fact that I have been sick for two weeks and have uni the next day doesn't seem to enter into the FAL's psyche.

The irony is that if attendance wasn't compulsory (and your attendance wasn't recorded by the FAL), then I would gladly go to every event I could reasonably make it to. But because I feel I am constantly being coerced into going to these things out of some unreasonable sense of duty, I just don't want to go sometimes.