Putting the FUN in

Limited discretionary funds resulted in a subscription to Basic Cable; a choice that left me with no option but to invest 2 hours of my life in a Mandy Moore movie last night. My life is also a bit emptier due to a dearth of MSNBC. While I do not miss the utterly irritating mid-day broadcasters, I miss my Morning Joe. Without the witty, thoughtful political banter between Joe, Mika and their frequent guests, I’ve been forced to watch the Today Show. The bite sized captions of news are not enough to satiate my daily desire to delve into the Washingtonian circus and proceedings of the incumbent administration. Often interesting segments are cut short to make way for ‘regular people’ interests such as the Jonas Brothers and on-line shopping. Each of these fascinating topics has its place in life, but not directly after the pronouncement of a death toll in Iraq or the new Secretary of Treasury who is charged with pulling the nation out of its financial crisis.

This morning there was a story regarding a child who was in the unfortunate circumstance of having a key lodged in his brain. Too grossed out to hear anymore than that headline and subsequent x-ray photo of said child with said key clearly outlined in his dome, I changed the channel and happened upon a news story that got me thinking.

The news story was a rather banal account of a family that experiences the stressors common to intensive family time had around the holidays. All well-known neuroses seem to surface and become widely discussed among family alliances prior to, after and sometimes during well-attended holiday functions. As the story noted, all families are dysfunctional. DUH. But the story seemed to emulate the gossiping and inside jokes that increase family drama exponentially. Throughout the turmoil that my parents divorce threw upon my family for the past few years, the consistent positive has been the dismissal of such insider/outsider tendencies that allow family drama to thrive.

There has been much reported on about the evolving relationships between parents and their Echo-Boom children. We tend to be more communicative and less deferential to our parents. While this changed approach to the most essential of relationships comes with its own faults, and I certainly could have done with LESS communication about my parents divorce as it was concurrently affecting me as a kid or that relationship, there is a really great offspring (pun intended) that’s come in the generational culture shift- at least in my family. I look forward to the holidays; our bizarre eccentricities are all out on the table and addressed so we have more time for board games and dance parties. It took a lot of time, a lot of seemingly reiterative conversations and a lot of tears to get there- and we will doubtless need to have many others as we grow together. Maybe I should write to Matt and Meredith and ask them to do more segments on effective communication and less stereotyped families; we with dysfunctional families tend to defy stereotypes anyway. At least they can come up with something more useful than a key lodged in the brain.