Norman Rockwell or Norman Bates? Holidays are dysfunctional for some

By David McElroy · November 28, 2013

For some people, holidays evoke images of close, loving families straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. They love their families and cherish the memories of the past and love everything about seeing their families for Thanksgiving.

For others of us, spending time with families sounds like a terrible idea, because it makes us feel lousy and it brings up bad memories of the past. What’s more, family-oriented holidays can be times when there’s an unspoken conspiracy of silence to pretend that the rest of your family’s history never happened.

For those of us who see extended families that way, it’s more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell.

Another family holiday coming around reminds me again of the fundamental split between these groups. For some people, it’s a wonderful time. For others — including me — it’s just a reminder of families who were more painful than loving.

What’s worse is that most of those who attach pain to family still go through the motions of pretending to be part of something loving and special. But the maudlin things that families say to each other on family-oriented holidays are rarely consistent with how they relate to one another for the rest of the year.

I can never decide whether this inconsistency is sad or funny. I guess it’s both. This is why so much of life is self-satirizing to me. If you had a Norman Rockwell family, that’s great. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the way others of us feel — because it seems to be considered impolite to admit that the other side of the coin exists.

When I was a child, holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas were times when I knew my father was going to be angry and there was going to be tension in the house. When I was very young and my mother still lived with us, they would end up arguing and things would be dangerously tense. (She left for the first when when I was 5, and she left for good when I was 9.)

At times, my father was kind and loving, but he could become a raving angry man without warning. When my mother didn’t do things his way, he was angry and belittling. When his three children did something he didn’t like, the kind Dr. Jekyll could easily turn into the screaming Mr. Hyde. I associate holidays with fear and anger at worst and resentment of other things at best. We never knew what to expect.

Other people have very different stories. Maybe their families weren’t filled with anger and yelling. Maybe their formative years were filled with the silence of indifference. Or maybe their lives were filled with physical abuse. Or sexual abuse. There are many, many different forms that dysfunction can take, but they usually share one common theme. We don’t talk about what happened. In fact, many people pretend it never did happen. Sometimes, those who caused the problems swear that you’re making everything up.

Some of us react by staying away from families. I quit going to any family-related holiday gatherings as soon as I got out of college. Others grudgingly attend such functions, but feel angry about being there. Many use alcohol or other drugs to get through the holidays. And many burn with anger at having to pretend to be nice to people who they harbor grudges against.

On holidays, I’m frequently invited to other people’s family gatherings, because some people know that I don’t have family of my own now. I appreciate the offers, but I decline. Here’s why. I want my own. I want it very much. But until I have my own family to build loving traditions around, other people’s gatherings seem to be like grotesque parodies of something I’d like to exist in my own life.

So even loving families come across as living, breathing satire to me.

Satire is for idealists who have been bitterly disappointed by reality. When I made my first short film, it was a satire of politics, a field where I once thought I could make a difference and change the world. When I think about other satire that I’d like to do in one medium or another, it’s all about things that mean something to me. I don’t do satire because I hate family or hate the maudlin love of homeland or anything like that.

I do satire because I want to believe. I want to believe that people can live together in peace and care about each other and respect each other’s rights. I want to believe that families can love each other and trust each other. I really want to believe. But I don’t see those things in real life.

So when I make fun of dysfunctional families, it’s not because I don’t think loving and functional families can exist. It’s certainly not that I don’t care. It’s because I care so much that it hurts. And because it hurts, I have to make fun of the absurdities I see.

Despite everything I’ve experienced, I’m an optimist. I still believe I’m going to be able to create a happy and loving family — the kind I never had growing up. Until then, I’m going to keep feeling pain about what I experienced and I’m going to keep looking for ways to express that need and hope in creative ways.

I might make fun of everything that seems sacred to you at times, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means I want to believe — and I’m still desperately searching for a way to save my bruised faith in family and build something worthy of believing in.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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