Meet the Parents

Last weekend, it was time for AC to meet the parents. Memorial Day weekend presented a golden opportunity, two days to undertake the meet and greet and a third day to deal with any fallout. Having a new significant other meet your parents is fraught with peril. It's a minefield of potential faux pas and unintended offenses. First impressions matter and because I live a good four hour drive from my parents and don't see them every week, opinions are hard to fix if something goes wrong. They can harden over time like petrified wood.

Or maybe that's just in my family. My dad's pretty easygoing and would give Medusa the benefit of every doubt ("Your hair is very nice, what do you feed those snakes to keep them so lively?"), so I never worry about him. But my mother is a different story entirely and more than makes up for any obstacles my father could impose. God love her, she's blunt, opinionated, and doesn't suffer fools gladly. She's open but also very proud and a bit stubborn. When she's around new people or family she doesn't see too often, she wears all of it like a suit of armor. The right person knows how to get past it and quickly learns what to disregard and what to pay attention to. It doesn't take long for my mother to warm up to someone when she sees they're not an asshole and that she can trust them with her real self. But that takes time, and often, repeated visits. Not everyone has that kind of patience.

AC, who I'm sure was on her best behavior (as I was two weeks ago when I met her grandmother and siblings), handled MTP very skillfully and with the requisite social adroitness. She listened to my mother's stories -- my mother has some great stories about our family, I've heard them 100 times and they never get old -- knocked back some wine and Danny Devito Limoncello, which she brought for the occasion, and even cleared the table with mi madre, which went over very well. I even felt comfortable leaving her alone and never worried that she might pee on the floor or chew on the furniture. AC is completely trustworthy that way.

She even met my cousins and uncle, who came up on Sunday. That was fun. My cousins N and P are like these older brothers who I vaguely remember making me dance like a monkey for their entertainment in my prepubescent years. P doesn't remember it, but when I was 5 or 6, he taught me how to say the words "fucking asshole," which he then prompted me to scream as loudly as possible from behind a chair in my parents' living room. N, who's as tall as the day is long, a trait of which I've always been jealous, I remember as a gentle giant who only occasionally went along with P's subversion of my integrity. Of course, now that we're older, the significance of our age disparity has mostly disappeared. I remember commiserating with N at my sister's wedding last July about dating, how hard it is at this point in life, and how finding someone special is like trying to pick out a unique grain of sand on Myrtle Beach. I never could have imagined a conversation like that with him twenty years ago. The same with P, who manages to stay sane and menstruation-free in a house of four women (one wife, three daughters). P keeps it reals.

And then there's my uncle, my father's older brother, who's an Italian soccer fanatic, former high school math teacher, and chess aficionado and who, at some core of his being, I know views himself as the Michael Corleone of the family. Whenever I've seen him, he's been good to me, interested in my life, what I'm doing, what my plans are. But like my mother, he's a proud man, thinks he knows better than everybody, and is not a fan of self-criticism. And, like my dad, he's not what you'd call a feminist. So putting Uncle A. and my mother together in the same room is like watching two elephants walk across a frozen pond in late March. You're reallly hoping they're going to make it across, but deep down, you know there's at least an 80% chance they're going to dunk their asses in frigid water before it's over.

Fortunately, getting older takes a bit of the edge off of all of us, and the same is true of my uncle and mother, who got along better than expected and even disappeared for a half hour to discuss my mother's new gardening/landscaping passion. They do have some things in common: both are avid readers and pay close attention to the news. On Sunday, Uncle A. was at his most charming -- he has a great sense of humor and loves to bust balls -- and he even helped my mother clear the table (!) Things were looking pretty good until the wine and limoncello kicked in and the old family stories started to surface. Funny, all of them, but there are some you just can't tell in mixed company without someone getting defensive or upset. That didn't stop my mother (it never does). I'm telling you, she LOVES stories. Of course, she tends to favor those where it's other people who did something stupid or played the misguided antagonist.

So... when the stories started to come out after a few drinks, I could feel a shift in the wind. Uncle A. and madre started getting a little snippy at each other, doing the passive-aggressive dance, or what passes for passive-aggressive in my family, it's actually not that subtle. Things began to escalate, and that's when I heard the fearful sound of an elephant's foot crunching through ice. N and P got really quiet, like obedient cows waiting for the thunderstorm. As my mother was about to pursue a story she told that starred a baby cousin N., my deceased grandmother, Uncle A., and a paper bag (don't ask), one that had raised a hackle in Uncle A., I firmly suggested that we change the subject. That deposition jousting with prickish opposing counsel does come in handy sometimes. It worked; the elephants made it across the pond unscathed.

That night, I got my parents to break out "The Slides," 20 carousels of Kodak slides that depict my family origins: my parents' wedding and honeymoon, my birth and toddlerhood and those of Sister J., and various and sundry childhood trips to Italy. I hadn't seen The Slides in at least 10 years, and boy, they blew my mind this time. My parents were so young, so beautiful, and possessed an innocence and humor that I wish they'd managed to hold on to in subsequent years. My mother was 21, gorgeous, stylishly dressed in the pink-checkered pants and belted dresses of the day. She looked happy and open-hearted. My father was 27, so handsome with a full head of black hair, a megawatt smile, and incredibly hip collared shirts, slacks, and dress shoes that I have never seen him wear in my life. He looked like a movie star. They both appeared hopeful and optimistic, engaged and open to each other.

There was one interesting slide from their honeymoon where my father is sitting a canoe or kayak (from a 2009 vantage point, my parents in a canoe together is completely hilarious -- trying something similar today would result in one of them getting paddle-boarded within 10 minutes), my father is wearing a tight navy bathing suit, his ropey muscles are shining in the sun, and he has on these trendy Wayfarer sunglasses. A string of long, wet black hair is hanging over his face, Elvis style. He's got a cigarette in his mouth and he looks totally badass.

In his left hand, he's holding a plate with two Sloppy Joe sandwiches that my mother made for him. "I didn't know how to cook back then," my mother says. "Your father didn't like it." Indeed, he looks disappointed, and has this WTF pout on his face as he looks at the camera.

A couple of things strike me about this slide. Besides how young and handsome my father looks, I was interested in the fact that my mother took the picture, which came out really good, as did many others she took on their honeymoon. I've never seen her with a camera in her hand. She doesn't even like to pose for pictures. Then my father holding the Sloppy Joes with a scowl on his face. Two slides later, the Joes are still on the plate, uneaten, as he lies napping in the sun. I think how that must have hurt my mother's feelings. I think about the expectations and hopes they both had back then, how little they knew each other, how young they were, and everything that came after. I think how raw they both were. I think if maybe my father had been a little different at that point in time, if maybe he'd eaten the Sloppy Joes and runny eggs my mother used to make before she became the gourmet that she is now, maybe the future would have been happier for both of them. And if my mother had continued to take pictures, played more with my father, kept that happy, willing spirit that I saw in so many slides that night, maybe.... But that's easy to say. I'm 40, living in an age of therapy and marital awareness. They were kids. Therapy was for crazy people. A husband did this, and a wife did that. They were babes in the woods with a lot to learn. They were just people, with their own idiosyncrasies and imperfections. It's easy to look back, but I still wish we could do a rewind and work on some shit.

There were slides of me too. Me red-faced and utterly naked at 3 months, lying on a changing table. Me clad in Buster Browns, plaid pants, and a furry blue winter jacket, racing outside in five feet of snow. Me crying ten minutes later because I wanted to come back inside. Me with the jacket off and crying ten minutes later because I wanted to go back outside. Apparently, existential indecisiveness plagued me from the get-go. There were a few of me on my first birthday, mashing pink and blue cake all over my face. There's one of me at about 6 months old, where I'm crawling on a blanket and I'm smiling, and another one where I'm around the same age and sacked out on my mother's ass while she sleeps. But in most of them, I look like I'm trying to figure shit out, or like I have the world on my shoulders already. I seemed anxious. Pensive. There were a few slides of cousins N and P too. They were years older than me, but they seemed to have the same look on their faces as I did.

Were we born like that, or did it come from somewhere else? Both, I think. Of course, we bring things to our personality when we're born, that mysterious chemistry that comes from the combined DNA of our mother and father. But beyond that, much of who we are is socially injected in us within our first six years of life. We suck up the environment around us like tiny vacuum cleaners, for better or worse.

How much can we be blamed for what comes later? After all, it's not easy to meet the parents.