Watching Your Neighbors Kill a Goat

I used to have this one dress that I wore quite a bit when I was going out and wanted to look simultaneously sexy and innocent. Not sure if I ever truly succeeded, or how I would know if I HAD succeeded, because what would I expect, really, that someone would say I looked hot but then not try to kiss me? Actually, maybe it DID work... But the thing about this dress was that it fit really well everywhere except around my ribcage it was rather snug, tight enough, in fact, that it was somewhat of a struggle to remove it at the end of the night. But it was so darn cute! So on those fateful nights that I really wanted to wear it, I would pull it out of my closet and hold it up, admiring it with both admiration, sort of a familiar pride, I guess, and also this hesitancy, or reluctance to actually go there because there was the niggling foreboding that at some point in the next few hours, I would find myself struggling, a struggle just short of panic yet defined by claustrophobia, in which I would quietly and calmly wriggle and writhe for some indeterminate period of time, and then, suddenly, I was free! mussed (and mostly probably tipsy and unsmooched), short of breath, exhausted and in a compromised position, but, nevertheless, unencumbered and ready for bed.

Last night we had our first "family dinner" since my return to North Carolina. I sat at Elmo's Diner and watched the living, breathing, snarling, growling, drooling, giggling creature that is Our Family Dynamic, come to life as if someone had poured water on some psychogoonie that binds us all, beautifully and seamlessly, together. And me sitting there watching and listening played the same size part as every other member of my family. I think my friend Michele said it best, in reference to something else that I cannot exactly recall, but she said, "It's sort of like watching your neighbors kill a goat." That despite its ghastliness, or maybe because of its ghastliness, you simply cannot look away. Now keep in mind that in Hawaii the Filipinos like to slaughter goats in their backyards for huge and wildly festive occasions like, say, lunch, so the sights and, more horrifically, the sounds of that became very clear to me. But it really is like that. You sit there and watch this beast come to life and rear up its head and bleat and bleed and there I am, no longer at the table nibbling salmon cakes and succotash, but reaching around behind me in the dark, stumbling and fumbling for my zipper on that damn dress with a feeling like, this is so familiar and it fits but also I knew this was going to happen and maybe I've outgrown this? and then: I want out. Now?

Theatrical, isn't it? Our Family Dynamic does not exist, cannot exist, completely until I am here. So I am also feeling a tad responsible for drawing us all together to witness The Slaughter. So we laughed and stabbed each other and ate and drank and do what every family everywhere does--because all you can really ever do is love them for who they are and who they aren't. I don't know about you but I have never really bought into that theory that "you don't choose your family." I think we do choose our family members, we must choose each and every one of them for they offer us (as painful as it may be) the single greatest opportunity for growth, if for nothing else than to demonstrate to us how we don't want to be. And to also challenge you to identify those admirable traits in them that you also possess, to look beyond what may appear foreign and maddening, for family members are our dearest and clearest mirrors. You want to look away...but you also sort of don't. Because you just might miss a glimpse of who you really are.