Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

Yesterday, my aunt Lori greeted me in the living room of my grandmother’s house with her new 9mm Smith and Wesson pistol. She was aiming for my head. And if that doesn’t tell you how my family relations have deteriorated in the last year or two, I don’t know what will. Because while my aunt didn’t think she had a bullet in the chamber and while she had taken the magazine out, my mother says everyone on earth knows you shouldn’t aim a gun at someone else when you don’t intend to use it.

My mother was really upset with my aunt but didn’t say anything—she’s a non-confrontational northerner, after all—because she knows you don’t play around with guns. My mother says my father once cleaned his rifle after hunting and though he thought it was unloaded, it went off and shot a hole in our oven. I sort of remember being only four or five years old, standing with my mother only about four feet away from the oven. Shocked. Aware even at that age that I could’ve died. And though I’m not sure my aunt has heard that story, she watches the nightly news enough to realize pointing a gun at someone is a very bad idea.

Things have been bad with my family for a while, but somehow I am just now coming to grips with all of our problems. My friends say my family puts the “fun” in dysfunctional, but I’m not so sure. A year ago I was at my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving, and I told her excitedly that I could be going to India during the summer for a school trip (though it later fell through). Her response was, “Why are you telling me this?” She wasn’t excited, supportive, or happy. She was sort of sarcastic and angry. And I realized then that my father is not the only one who is constantly critical of my actions.

My family listens for the bad news instead of the good, mostly in order to rub it in. We—and I admit to being caught up in that cycle for many, many years, until the last year—gossip and experience all the schadenfreude that is characteristic of nasty people. “Oh, Steve quit his job and couldn’t find a new one?” Poor him. “I can’t believe he’s in his forties and living with his mother now, after being so successful.” I realize now how much of this I participated in, how awful I’ve been. I also realize that part of the reason it was so hard to want to be happy for many, many years was because I didn’t think happiness existed—and if it did, my family mocked it. I was constantly critical of everyone else, but that also meant I was critical of myself, too. I know everything bad you could ever say about me, because I have said it about myself, and my father has said it to me while drunk, and my family has probably said it about me behind my back.

By the time my aunt had asked why she should care about my India trip, I was back in therapy. I was dealing with the fact that I had a sister I’d never met and the fact that I hated myself. As I said before, I had to learn to love myself. I also had to learn coping mechanisms for being around my father. I realized last Thanksgiving, though, that I also had to learn coping mechanisms for being around my family. Because when I started to change and started trying to be happy, my family certainly didn’t respond well. I get a lot of sarcastic responses, as well as, “Well, don’t you think you’re something?”

My therapist told me that families are like mobiles hanging above a baby’s crib. Each person is one string, and when one string moves and changes—grows—the mobile is set off balance. When you change, your family changes. And families don’t like this; they’re always trying to regain the same balance, to right the mobile. Does that make sense? I hope so.

And so for the past year, I’ve been trying to figure out how to change without dealing with the consequences. My therapist has taught me coping mechanisms, and a lot of time that means avoidance—but she is gone now, and anyway I am supposed to have the tools to deal with my family myself. But I just don’t always know what to do when my mother and I discuss getting an iPhone for Christmas and my aunt overhears, causing her to call my mother three days later and tell her that she, too, is getting a smart phone but it’s the Samsung Galaxy—which has “better ratings.” My grandmother told me on Christmas Eve that my aunt and I were trying to “one up” each other, which is sort of sad. My aunt is over 50 and I am 29. I have wanted an iPhone for four years now, and that desire is completely unrelated to my aunt. What was a lovely gift from my mother has now become a source of stress for me when talking to and about my aunt.

I don’t mean to place all the blame on my family, but I don’t know how to improve our relationship. I only know to stay away, to keep my business as private as possible, to be who I am independent of them. It’s been a long time coming, I guess. But I just know that yesterday, after I got home from my grandmother’s house, after Tiff and I watched The Fellowship of the Ring, and after I put on my pajamas, I listened to Ray LaMontagne’s “Shelter” on repeat and wished I had someone else to shelter me. I keep trying to build my family out of my friends, but most of them are married and I am not, and sometimes I just want someone to hold me. I want someone to shelter me, and I, too, will shelter him from the world—and especially from my family.