Families... Not Again!

The Addams Family, 1964

   How do you turn a perfectly good day into a blue one? There are several ways. Here’s one, you decide to do the maths of your bank account. Here’s another, you pay a call-visit to your family. I did both today. I haven’t yet made up my mind whether I should name me brave or self-destructive. Then again, bravery includes many self-destructive acts along the way. Enough philosophy, let’s go back to the wreckages of a day.

   The sun is still shining here and the weather is still warm. I should have been walking around all day free and easy. Instead, by teatime I was already so tensed that I’ll need a hummer to straighten up my back muscles. It’s nobody’s fault, actually. Sometimes I tend to take things more seriously than I should. I mean, most families are difficult to handle anyway (the rest are just impossible) and many people faces small droughts in their pockets now and then. Everyday’s matters, same all, same all, just routine, right? Wrong.

  There are these days bright as possibly can be, but all you see are clouds, even if there aren’t any. This is the effect of families and particularly families miles away.

   You see, one of the advantages of moving away from the family nest, the neighborhood, the country is that you don’t have to set dinners for the in-laws, arrange meetings and attend to all these obligations that everyone is expecting you to, especially after getting married. That’s the good aspect. The bad one (beside that you miss them, after all is your family for heaven’s sake) is that everything gets over-magnified or oversimplified, specifically because you are not there.  You either going to get a full version, with all the drama and colors of every little detail, the exhausting analysis of an incident with all the ifs and buts that can possibly exist in a human brain. Or you are going to get the ‘nothing important really’ version. When you hear that expression make no mistake, is damn serious, they just don’t want to frighten you up. Then the struggle starts, slowly and painfully you’ll have to guess what’s behind the lines, what’s the right question, what the frickin is going on. Then the sun is gone and the day is lost.

   Alas, families will always find their way in.