Alex: Gee Mallory, I see you've been putting in your quality time at the mall.
Mallory: Yeah? Well at least I don't carry a Richard Nixon lunch box.
(Canned laughter, enter Jen.)
Jen: Why don't boys like me? Oh I'm so ugly!
(Runs wailing into the arms of Mrs. Keaton.)
Mrs. K: Now kids, we don't always get along, but we're still a loving family. How about a group hug!
(Cue cheesy music and cut to commercial.)
Ah, Family Ties, the matriarch of 1980's sit coms. Granted, the show's impact was about as enduring as the acting career of Tina Yothers, but for a few years, a good number of us faithfully tuned in and mindlessly laughed at the Keaton family antics.
The beauty of the show was in its predictability. You knew that you would turn on NBC and Michael J. Fox would be a jumpy conservative Republican, Justine Bateman would say something stunningly vapid, and absolutely nothing would shatter the ideals of their middle-American life. Every new season of the show brought back the same consistency, with the exception of Andrew somehow aging from newborn to six in the span of a year. A few ancillary characters were thrown in for spice, but you could always depend on those perfectly unchanging Keatons.
Back to reality ... I spent a great deal of time this summer with my Mom, Dad, and twelve-year-old sister Lauren. The set and characters were the same as they'd ever been -- I lived all my life in the same house with the same family, but something was frighteningly askew. For the entire summer, we got along alarmingly well.
One Saturday night in August, as I was making the usual dinner reservation at our favorite restaurant, the owner said, "Okay! So that's a reservation for three at seven o'clock."
Come again? We've been a family of four since the Reagan Administration. Then it hit me. I was the one he wasn't counting. I spent a year in New Hampshire, but the Sloane family continued on without me.
The truth of what was going on didn't become lucid until Lauren called me the other day. As I was feverishly thinking of questions to ask her in order to lead the conversation, she surprised me with "How are you, Julie?" Stunned at her maturity, I mustered up a witty, "Um. I'm ... fine."
Could this be? My baby sister becoming a young lady? It's happening, and it's happening without me. When we go to college and leave home, our family dynamics are never quite the same again. It would be obvious to say that the college experience changes a person, but we seldom think about the family we leave behind changing also. To put things in terms of the physics problems I should be doing right now, our velocity vectors don't point in the same direction any more. We're accelerating in completely opposite directions ... or are we?
It gives me a wickedly rebellious pleasure to point out to my parents that they raised me for eighteen years and now they simply have to leave me to act for myself. That may be true by virtue of the 400 miles between us, but little by frightening little, I think I'm becoming them. And to varying degrees, I think the moment we break free from the bondage of home, we immediately seek out our former home stability.
It shows up in the most peculiar ways. My roommate, Anne, announced to me the other day that she was going to take a study break to clean her ears. While it's not something I'd think of doing, I recognize the importance of aural hygiene so I asked that she give me a q-tip as well. "I don't use q-tips," she said sheepishly. Intrigued as to how this earwax removal was to be accomplished, I asked suspiciously just what it was she was going to stick in her ear.
"The end of a paper clip," she said quickly, ducking into the bathroom so as to avoid the shock she knew I'd have. A paper clip?!
"You're going to poke a hole in your eardrum!" I exclaimed.
"My dad does it too, though. It's alright, I've done it before."
Then I realized, that conversation could just as easily have happened between our parents. Anne is forever doing quirky things she picked up from her parents, and I'm forever warning her of their perilous consequences, mirroring the cautious teachings of my own youth. Anne has learned to use a substance known as "spray butter" and I'm convinced it causes cancer. Seriously, that is so unnatural!
Butter in a bottle aside, now that I have the independence to make my own choices, I'm amazed at how much of my parents is reflected in my judgment. We're not like the Keatons; with the passage of time, each member of our respective families is taking their life in a different direction. Yet those independent directions are guided by the fundamental ties of family. As much as we as college students are blazing our own trails in life, we're never cognitively far from the people who raised us. Family ties truly are the ties that bind.
