or many people in life, families are their lives. Their parents, their siblings, their spouses or significant others, their children and nieces and nephews all mean incredibly much, and that's great. I've seen many families like this close-up, and it's incredibly heart-warming. My family, however, is not heart-warming in any sense of the word, really. Or even emotional to any degree. They're like a well-oiled machine. Everyone knows where the boundaries are, and no-one would even dare to get close (except me, perhaps, the black sheep of the family) for fear of upsetting the status quo, which has been in place for oh, at least 30 years.I think I have a strange family. They're completely average in many respects, I guess... a 2.4 children family. White, middle-class, both parents having worked their way up from relatively mediocre backgrounds over the past 40 or so years. They were both university-educated when going to university was actually about education, and they've both had steady jobs and average salaries their whole lives. My dad was always the "career" worker, and we moved around a couple of times because of his job, which he'd held since leaving university. My mum trained as a caterer, and was able to find good work wherever we were, even though it meant leaving good (colleagues-cum-)friends behind each time. We lived in middle-class housing estates where the houses all looked alike. My brother and I went to "good" schools. I was always more academically-inclined than him, and went to a grammar school, and he went to the local comprehensive where he excelled at sport more than learning. And he was always more outgoing than me, and I think this is the root of the favouritism, I guess, that my parents make quite evident now... in ways that they're probably not even aware of. He is their ideal child, a son after their own heart. He owns a house, mortgaged up to his eyeballs, that he's going to have to work the rest of his life to pay off, he has a job which he doesn't enjoy, but which pays most of the bills, a credit card which is maxed out, he has a company car, he has a wife, and soon, a child, who will probably grow up just like him. Which won't be a bad thing, because he's a generally nice all-round good chap. But then there's me. I work short-term contracts, I don't have a house, mortgage or car because I move around way too much, I start to sweat if I have more than $100 on my credit card, I don't have a wife or child or any hopes of securing either in the short-term future. I had one of each, but the wife was too much of a nut to handle normal life. To my parents I'm probably too academic, too awkward and too goddamn carefree -- debts make you responsible, damnit! -- and I just enjoy life too much to be shackled like that. So we go through this charade, my parents and me. I call them every week or two to let them know that I'm still alive and still not married/mortgaged/permanently employed, and to hear the latest way they have conceived to tell me that they have actually done nothing in their lives since the last phonecall. There is no exchange of emotion, any sign of a controversial point of view from me is swiftly dismissed with an "Oh well", any disagreement is rapidly shuffled off the table of discussion. It's a routine, it's a performance, it's rote.
I have a family, but they don't know me, and I don't belong to it.
