I am over 30 years old. I have given birth to two children. I backpacked through Eastern Europe before the time of cell phones, Mapquest, and GPS. I have lived in major cities in the US, I am good at parallel parking, and I can even change a flat tire.
But when I travel with my mother, she still needs a phone call to know if I made it back to the hotel all right, even when the hotel is only a few blocks from the restaurant where we have just dined.
I don’t mind making the phone call. It is a fairly minor inconvenience, one that costs nothing but minutes from my cellular plan, and it puts my mother’s mind at ease. But I have come to realize that it doesn’t matter if I’m 60, or if I become a world famous martial arts expert, or if I invent a rocketship that can fly to Mars. My mother will still always need that phone call, because she will always worry. Because that’s what good mothers do. It’s the role mothers play, so my mother plays it.
But my mother isn’t the only one who has a role. I partied with my family this Christmas season, and every time I go back, I feel myself sliding into the spot I am supposed to fill, the position I took growing up. I always think that things will be different, but they never are. What can I say–some scripts are just too hard to rewrite.
And the script just doesn’t stop with my immediate siblings. This year I watched as the script wrote itself for the next generation, for my children and their cousins. Every year, my husband’s family does the Nativity, complete with costumes, props, and Baby Jesus represented by a stuffed duck. My son is, and always has been, Joseph. I even went so far as to MAKE him a Joseph costume one year, and we have the pictures to prove it.
But my 4 year old nephew, a lad who has always had the honor of being a wiseman bringing gifts, wanted to be Joseph this year. Yeah. Right. Good luck with that, kiddo.
“I’m ALWAYS Joseph”, my son said, and the two of them tussled over the towel and headband until they were both near tears. My SIL finally intervened and gave her son a shiny little car and told him he could bring that to the Baby Jesus duck. (She’s a mother who knows that Matchbox can solve most problems with 4 year old boys.) I thought, Poor kid. As long as my son is around, my nephew will always have to be a wiseman. And if my infant daughter grows up and ever wants to be Mary? Fuhgeddaboutit. My niece has been playing Mary since before my daughter was born.
Are we the only family who has these scripts? What roles do you and your siblings play in your family, and do you always revert when you get together? Are these scripts a negative thing, and are they inevitable with big families?
As for me, catch up with me in a few years, and I will probably be making a new Joseph costume for my kid. And I am certain I will have my cell phone handy, programmed with my mother’s number on speed dial.
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Yes! Yes yes! I’ve lived away from my family for 5 years, I have children of my own, I am independent in almost every sense. And yet, when I go home, I am the baby. I am the one expected to answer the phone, have no opinion on family matters, smile sweetly, bring the magic of the holidays to life for the rest of the clan. Sometimes my role feels fake, like I’m not this person anymore. But sometimes my role feels like the sweetest sense of comfort, like it’s the only role in which I will ever feel at home.
I had a hard time adjusting to my husband’s family because he is the youngest. He has five older sisters and they are used to taking care of him. In my family, I’m the older sister. I’m used to planning the parties and baking and all that. For several years I was minorly offended by things like being completely left out of another sister’s wedding preparations or being asked last-minute to bring ice cream to a family party (I love to cook for other people). Things have changed and we’ve all learned to adjust to each other. We both get frustrated though because in our families my hubby and I are both the “good kids” who never fight with our parents. We’re always expected to be mediators in family disputes and we always feel pressure to be nice to our moms, even when they drive us up the wall.
Ha! I love this –last spring, when my parents and recent-RM brother came to visit us, we discussed this very issue.
We ALL revert to our previous “roles”:
My baby brother is spoiled. Honestly, we go out, he’s twenty-flippin’-one, and he begs mom and dad to buy him some candy. They concede.
My sister, the favorite (everyone’s favorite. There is no shame in this –we all agree on it!), goes back to the peace-keeping and organizing role.
My other brother (just yonger than me) reverts to the dissenter role –the rebel, if you will. Constant disagreement, just for the sake of disagreement.
Me? I’m the oldest. And so I become the bossy one; and the scapegoat of sorts. However, my parents treat me as if I was 12 again and not a thriving mother of four. It’s not intentional –in fact, my mother is wonderful –but she can’t help it. I’m her child. We are her children. She’ll always see us as we were years ago, living in her home.
Luckily for my husband, it’s just the same.
He’s the hero –the one everyone believes will solve all dilemmas. His 2 younger sisters are the fun ones. However, they are all pretty independent (probably having something to do with the fact that they are each four years apart).
I think reverting to previous roles is somewhat of an irony that we can’t escape. People see us as we were, and so we tend to become what we were, even for just a moment.
The patterns and habits of childhood don’t go away. When my mother visited in my home she treated me differently than when I was a guest in her home. It seemed easier to have a different relationship when I was in charge of our environment.
I wonder sometimes if things would have been different if we had all lived near each other. It is like our relationships (sibling etc.) are stuck in a previous time because we each have experiences that have helped us to grow in different directions, but since we see each other only occasionally we are stuck in what was. If we had common memories and shared from the days, months or years apart would those experiences alter the patterns. Maybe. I don’t know.
Let me try that last sentence in the second paragraph again. There is a word missing. If we had common memories and shared experiences from the days, months or years apart would those experiences alter the patterns.
The phone call to your mom cracked me up, only because it’s the same with me and my mom. My parents are in Russia on a mission and I still email her to let her know that we got home from a trip. Or if dh goes out of town on a business trip I call his mom to let her know that he got there safetly, because she appreciates that. It’s crazy that as a grown woman, mother of 2 that I still feel like mom needs to know where I am!
As to falling back into our rolls in our families, my dh hates when the all 10 of me and my siblings get together. He says he feels like he loses his wife for a couple of days until everyone goes home, which is totally true.
Apparently my script is “invisible.” Since my parents died, my brothers and their families have no room for me in their lives at all. They’re good guys, there’s been no specific trouble, but they never respond to my attempts at contact and they never contact me.
Lonely sister, I am sorry to hear that you feel invisible. Some people are so much better than being thoughful than others. We had some guests for the first time this year who were the dad of my cousin’s husband and also uncle(his dad’s brother). While my cousin and her husband are almost always with us on the holidays, we usually do not have people outside of the family. My mom had huge reservations especially as our kitchen badly needs remoldeling etc. It ended up turning out really well. We had some good conversations. They seemed to enjoy our traditions. And they loved watching the little ones open gifts. I hope that you get a chance to have the warmth of others in future celebrations. Surely, your script is not “invisible.” People sometimes have no idea how left out you may feel. I am not saying that is a good excuse. I see you! I wish there was something more I could do. I hope it gets better in the Year to Come for you.
One of my parents likes me to be what I call “monkey girl.” I refuse to give my rendition of a skit from “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” now. I have matured past that. I also try to avoid giving my true life story of how I graduated with honors after many years and was gainfully emplyoyed selling pens although it so greatly amuses my parent. Despite all of my idiosyncracies and problems, I feel like I fit into my family pretty well on the ocassions that we get together. I do like to entertain, but with my own original scripts. And I like to make conversation with everybody.
Yes. Family roles seem to be made in stone. As long as I live some people will only see me as a certain age or position in the family, which is both good and bad. Same with hubby.
As far as the phone calls goes, I think of it more as considerations than obligations. Hubby always calls home each night prior to leaving from his office, just to let me know he’s on the road. We always inform each other of our itineraries for the day, just in case, and we in turn inform our parents when we “jet set”. We would love to know the same from our now adult children. Children, however, are resistant to “revealing all” once they leave the roost. sigh, perhaps when they have young of their own they will get the whole “just in case” scenario.
On that Christmas play: Maybe it’s time to assign roles by who is youngest? i.e. Oldest children up to ___ age are Mary and Joseph. ___ is the Angel, ___ is Shepard, and on down the line to the younger ones, who know and hope their turn at the top roles will come with age.
This is taking me back to my FamSci class from my major-flipping days at BYU….
I think every family has scripts. I’m not yet convinced we always have to perpetuate them, though. Must we ‘fall into our roles’ when we gather with our family of origin? Sometimes that is good, but other times…. I think sometimes awareness of them might help us consider trying to change them, when possible, when they are unhealthy or unnecessary.
About ten years ago I had made plans to spend the day observing the legislature in session at SLC. My mother actually asked me over the phone “Who is driving?” I was speechless.
Mothers do worry and the older my kids get the more I see there is to worry about, but I hope I can use a little discretion in the outward display of my worry. Either that or try to stay too busy to worry obsessively.
As for scripts, I completely agree with Michelle. With an awareness and effort we can make rewrites when necessary. There is a lot of resistance to it for sure, but it can be done.
Oh, family roles. Definitely, we have the “funny one” (not me), the “tempermental one,” the “rebel” – but I think we are gradually, GRADUALLY starting to let go of those misconceptions and starting to accept each other as adults. Because people DO grow past the person they were at fifteen, thank goodness. And it’s been nice to see, in the past couple of years, that my family is finally starting to acknowledge that.
By the way Heather – we rotate the Joseph and Mary roles every year. ;>
This year my BIL was making fun of my husband for being a “tree hugging liberal.” That was probably true, back when he was in college. These days DH has 5.5 kids, drives a gas hog SUV and votes Republican most of the time. But facts can be too complicated to muddy the waters of family relationships.
I have steadfastly refused to play my part in the family script for a few Christmas’s now, and have caused great upheaval in our clan. I’m supposed to be the one in charge and bossy and all those first child roles, but I’ve refused. I’ve offered my help, but haven’t made any overtures to be in charge of ANYTHING.
It’s been a bit stressful for everyone, especially if they were hoping to just get to show up at a party without planning any of it. If I were more compassionate, I’d just sit back and accept my role quietly, to bring peace back to the universe. Maybe next year.
My family doesn’t have a set script. When most of us were in our late teens/early 20s, the folks moved cross-country. That disrupted all patterns. Then siblings started moving to different states. More disruption. All but one sibling have returned to the home state now, and we’ve all been getting reacquainted. Some things don’t change, like my brother’s weird sense of humor. But we don’t have a script because of those 15 years of living so far apart from each other. In fact, the other day I was laughing with my sister about how if anyone had told her as a teenager that she’d be the one to like family parties and I wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have believed them. Our roles have changed a lot.
As the oldest, it’s been hard for me to allow my siblings’ scripts to change. When they were in high school, I used to read their papers and help them revise. Suddenly in college, poof! they either no longer wanted my help, and found my tendency to overadvise annoying, whereas before they treated me like a sage. I miss being the sage. But I am learning, slowly, to bite my tongue.
I find my own script coming out with extended family, or, much much worse, people from high school: it’s like I’m back in high school sometimes, where the only thing I’m good at is school. People expected me to go places and do stuff, and I don’t know that my life now lives up to what they thought it would be.