Talkin' Talkin' 'Bout My Family Guilt Blues

I’ve always thought the really fucked up thing about being raised religious, then becoming a non-believer is that you get to keep all the learned guilt without any of the comfort in a sky wizard that will give you butterfly kisses while you get foot rubs from all your dead pets.  Once your brain is trained to turn everything into a crisis that is somehow your fault-its own kind of narcissism-it’s hard to unlearn that. Especially when all your therapy money is tied up in bar tabs and midnight movies.

I need to diversify my portfolio. I still talk to my parents at least once a month, and we do that phone dance where none of us say exactly what’s going on with our lives, put on our big-boy pants and act like everything is always ok. It’s strange, but that seems to be what works.

Anyone who’s seen my act knows I talk very openly and brutally about my family and my upbringing in front of total strangers. And I love my parents, but I’m very conflicted about how I was brought up. I’M OVER IT! But I don’t REALLY blame them for anything. I just think pain and confusion and frustration are funny and I’m not creative enough to make up stories from whole cloth.

So yeah, there’s many times I feel guilty talking about my family for laughs, when I really shouldn’t, I’m not Titusing that shit or anything, but that guilt remains. I wish my parents could see my act. I really do. But it would break their hearts. I know it. Especially my mother’s. If you think I’m being hyperbolic, just know that she still sends copies of Our Daily Bread in the mail every month to a man that hasn’t gone to church since he got a driver’s license. So I have to walk this line where I can never show my parents the thing I’m most proud of in my life.

Luckily, they’re old enough and old school enough that they’re not online. I think my mother just yells, “Bob, let’s log-up!” and my father hides in the closet and makes old AOL dial up noises while she looks at a desktop photo of a baby duck or something. Whatever works.

I just want everyone to be happy. That was always my role. The self-flagellating people pleaser. I still can’t stand it when I’m at a friend’s house and people yell from different rooms in the house. We had two-floors growing up and I think there were haunted spots in the house where sound travelled the best, like the ghosts from all the lost joy from fighting lived there and helped to amplify your call for dinner, or to hurry up I’ll be in the car, or dammit who left fill-in-the-blank out. Or maybe I shouldn’t watch Paranormal Activity 2 before bed. Pretty good flick, though. I blamed the family. The demon was just doing its job.