...And Then I Realized I'm Normal....

It's hard growing up in a family with a paranoid dyslexic mother and a father who's just this side of being a card-carrying sex offender.

Not to mention a sister who's had it out for you since the moment you grudgingly popped into this world.

Since I spoke with my cousin, I've been putting alot of the facts of my life in perspective. I always felt that there was something not right about the people who made up my immediate family. When I was a child, I noticed how they didn't react to things the way other people's parents did. I used to cry when other children had to go home after play dates. I couldn't articulate it then, but I'm sure it was my childish way of saying "please don't leave me alone to deal with these people!"

When I was older and had more encounters with the "outside world," I noticed that the ways I was taught to deal with situations was not the way others dealt with them, and that there were situations I had no idea how to deal with(and there was noone to teach me otherwise). I learned from textbooks that there were social patters and mores that were considered normal and acceptable, and none of those social patters and mores existed in my home.


I could never conform to the way things were in the household. I always asked questions and was told "there are secrets. you just don't understand." I could never accept this explanation or the things that seemed quite odd, irrational, and abnormal to me (even at a young age)--like mother roaming thru the house claiming that the neighbors had the house bugged, or father going off to the porno movies on a Friday night while I watched The Partridge Family and mother sat in the kitchen reading the paper.

I felt something was terribly, terribly wrong with the family scenario: why would the neighbors bug the house? And why did my father spend more time with porn movies and "dirty magazines" than he did with his family? Why was it that when we tried to go out to dinner he would flip out and make a scene or drink too much. Why was my mother always swearing at the woman who lived across the street and why did she forbid me to play with just about everyone in the neighborhood for no apparent reason?

When you grow up among crazy people who absolutely, positively believe they are normal and right, and tell you all you need to do is ignore and conform, to "straighten up and fly right," and you can't, you begin to think there's something wrong with you.

But first, you try to escape any way you possibly can--thru music, thru writing, thru acting out in very creative ways that look completely bizarre to them, thru getting married when you shouldn't.

Then, when all of that doesn't work anymore, you get suicidal.

Which then lands you in therapy. Years and years of therapy.

And in between years of therapy, you venture into just about every wing-ding, outre, and frightening little subculture you can get yourself into. Like an anthropologist, you observe, take notes, learn the lingo and the mannerisms, blend in, interact--all the time thinking that you have once and for all found your particular tribe.

But they figure you out.

Then you get ex-communicated. Like you did with your family.

It wasn't that you were crazy and had to find the right niche of crazies to accept you as family. It was that, all along, you were nothing more than normal and had to find the right Normals to fit in with.

The past two mornings, when I got out of bed, I realized more and more that I am absolutely, positively, unequivolcally normal. Yep, that's me, right as rain. I have no addictions, no compulsions, no obsessions. No learning disabilities, no physical handicaps, no profound mental or other personality disturbances. My social skills are a little wonky, but they're better than they were when I was younger. I can thank my wonderful normal friends for that. They've helped me alot in transitioning into the world of Normal.

Oftentimes, people who are normal take for granted that they are normal. My sense of alot of folks is that they like to play up the little tics and eccentricities that are simply part and parcel of human nature because being "just normal" is like admitting to being bland and insignificant. As if there's something wrong with having a decent job and a nice home and people who enjoy your company, and a family to share your life with.

There might not be much glamour to that, but it's hardly insignificant.

The lives of crazy people look glamorous but reality is far from it. Every day is a drama, and some crazies are good at parlaying those dramas into music, art, poetry, novels, and more. But, if you scratch the surface of some of these creative crazies, you'll find either some normals bankrolling them or, more insidiously, that they are not crazies at all...they're normals who, like myself, are very good anthropologists. They don't mind exploiting knowledge they've gained from crazyworld because crazy is cool.

Yet there's no real glamour or coolness to being crazy. There is no glamour to not being able to control your emotions or your thought processes; in mentally and emotionally torturing others or yourself; in physically abusing others or seeking to abuse yourself; in not being able to fit in and being in a constant state of panic or always on the defensive; in having people point at you or cluck their tongues at you or deny you employment. Crazies spend alot of time defending their turf because, deep down, they know their turf is not made of grass but of polyethylene and is stapled to the ceiling.

I don't have to defend my turf. It's not that kind of turf. I can stand on my turf--a nice little patch of Kentucky BlueGrass I've been cultivating for a couple of years now-- and share it with others whom I can also exchange turf-building and weed killing tips.

And, standing in the sun on my soft, green-growing carpet, I can finally admit that it's awfully nice being awfully normal. No doubt about it.



Family