family dysfunction

so, i'm coming off a full week of spending time with my in-laws: mother in-law (martha), father in-law (stacy), two brothers in-law, their wives (one pregnant), and three nieces and nephews. they're sweet and all...but gillens 24/7 can become tedious! some random thoughts...

martha and stacy had difficult childhoods. both felt the need, for some reason, to open up to me at different times during the past week and talk to me about their lives. martha's mother died of lung cancer when she was 16. by the age of 19, she had become pregnant (out of wedlock ~ a HUGE catholic no-no) and was promptly disowned and kicked out of her house. within the next ten years, she had five boys. i asked her how on earth she did it...and her response was, "i think ignorance was just bliss."

stacy's father had migrated from ireland as a boy and settled in watertown, new york. irish catholic = big drinkers. his father was a hard-working, strict catholic, who was also an alcoholic. a gentle, loving, dear man, who never touched his children, and would not allow fighting among his sons...but was known to absolutely pound any man who insulted his virtue.

stacy's mother was simply not nice. whether or not his father drank to survive the marriage is unknown. stacy told me a story about his father coming home after drinking one night, and his mother had locked him out. his father picked up a chair on the porch, threw it through the front window, climbed into the house, unlocked the door...climbed back out through the window, opened the front door, walked into the house, and told his wife very calmly to never do that again.

when stacy was 12, his father (vincent) moved out of the house and took his sons with him. his mother and father never divorced (another big catholic no-no), but maintained separate residences until vincent's passing almost twenty years later.

you know, one thing that i think all of us has in common is that we come from families that are ripe with dysfunction. i mean, seriously. do you truly know of a NORMAL family? it doesn't exist. we are all faulty and diseased and waist-deep in muck...every one of us. think about your family and the relationships that exist, or DON'T exist, within it. it's messy, isn't it? in reality, wouldn't a NORMAL family be defined as one that has undergone tremendous obstacles, but for some reason, love continues to prevail.

so here's to my mother and father in-law, who can sometimes drive me a little crazy. but heck, they've been through different types of hell and have come out on the other side.

and i'd say, that's some kind of miracle.