I have an aunt who likes to talk about her various bosses. I think she does it as a weird status symbol thing. Or it could be a case of wish fulfillment. It’s always “Dr. So and So said something interesting and has an amazing house. They live in a veritable museum and the weird proclivities and very human set of emotions and behaviors they exhibit are laudable because of what they’ve presumably sacrificed to achieve their social and professional success.” That’s the way I hear it anyway. It’s probably more nuanced and coded in reality. It’s probably more like “guess what really interesting thing my boss, Dr. Smith (pause for emphasis), said to me this week.” Or maybe it’s something like “Dr. Johnson has been very generous with his time and consideration. He gave me a very nice holiday gift this year.” I kind of tune it out when she gets going. I think the rest of the family does as well. We look around at each other waiting for her to finish or hope someone will interrupt.
My aunt has one daughter who has children of her own. My aunt (and uncle) wanted her to be a doctor and pushed her hard in that direction until she worked up the nerve to break free of that pressure and chase her own dreams. I’m not even sure what my cousin does now, but she seems happy according to social media. It was probably a devastating blow to my aunt’s pride. All that time and effort invested in forcing your one daughter into a life she didn’t want. Telling your friends about all the great things they were accomplishing in school. Constantly harping on the MD they were going to be. A beautiful set of professional accreditation letters blinking on the horizon. I didn’t know much about the pressure from my vantage point. In hindsight it must have been intense and unwarranted and impossible to achieve. Everyone involved probably deluded themselves into thinking it would work out in the end, magically or through good old fashioned hard work.
Another weird wrinkle to this memory is my aunt doesn’t have any redeeming qualities. It’s not like this one piece of her life is an aberration I can overlook because she was otherwise a decent person. That just wasn’t the case. She had this odd habit of saying the unsayable. Like if you had a huge zit on your forehead and it was the last thing you wanted to talk about she would make a point of drawing attention to it verbally. It wasn’t radical candor as much as a way of making a person feel small in the moment. I only saw it at large family events. You could see that people were more cautious around her, guarding secrets closer than normal. I can’t imagine what that glaring spotlight of attention was like on a regular basis. Probably unbearable for her immediate family. She was also very cold and probably attractive in the lifetime before I knew her. Maybe there was some resentment there. Her external self conditioned her to be emotionally distant. And her failures exacerbated her social deformities over time. I can only speculate about the pathology.
Luckily I have another uncle that acts as her antidote. He’s the exact opposite in every way. Which is why he is almost always the one that asks the first question whenever she gets on one of her rolls about her bosses. It is always the same question: “You’re still working as a house cleaner right?” She usually nods and parries the question aside. I can’t help but think that is the one thing she doesn’t want to talk about. Not because there is any shame in any particular job, but because the sound of it doesn’t align with her self-image.
Family dynamics can be strange, but I like the idea that sometimes they can be balanced, that there is some symmetrical comeuppance waiting to interrupt all of us when it’s deserved.
