when you're here, you're family

11 Mar, 2026

content notes: toxic family dynamics; in-groups and out-groups; racism

"Why does it smell like that?" the six-year old loudly asked. I was still washing my hands.

Her mother went "SHH" while I simultaneously said, equally loudly, "because it's a bathroom." We looked at each other and cracked up.

"You never know what kids are going to say," her mother said to me as we walked toward the door.

"Because it's a bathroom, after a matinee," I repeated, and we had a little giggle fit.

"I know! Kid, a lot of people have been in here—"

"The way you went SHH as that lady scooted by behind us—"

We were cryinggg as we left the bathroom wing of the theater. We embarked on our long walk toward the car. My best friend asked me if I could tolerate going out to lunch. We were both emotionally exhausted—overstimulated, actually. We'd both been forced into unwanted interactions all day long.

I hadn't escaped yet. On my way to the public restroom after the matinee, someone, an usher, had sharply asked me, from several aisles away, "what I was looking for." I had been walking in a straight line, looking at nothing, heading to the exit.

"I'm not looking for anything," I said, "I'm just walking a little ahead of my family," and I gestured behind me at five female human people of varying ages and abilities. My best friend had sent me ahead to the restrooms, and I was reluctantly headed there without what was, effectively, a security detail.

The usher, seeing she'd caught me off-guard, wavered before telling me they'd found a phone, that she was waiting for its owner to turn up. Like, she was evasively trying to get me to say I was searching for a phone.

"Oh!" I said. "Well, thank you for finding it... for someone. They'll notice it's missing in, like, fifteen minutes." At ease, soldier! Job well done! Carry on! Hold the line! By the time I was moving again, the family had totally caught up to me.

Then we walked to the car, praising the performances. My right kneecap slipped out of place ("ow"); my friend criticized the theater's aging chairs. We drove past the mall. The six-year old piped up that she wanted to go inside, to go shopping. It was a Saturday.

I admitted I'd started feeling chest pains during the matinee so, although the kiddo was understandably wired, I did not wish to powerwalk through the mall, I explained. Now we were getting out of the car, walking from the parking space to the double-doors of the sit-down franchise restaurant. I had escalated to describing three days of deeply concerning physical symptoms, all while attempting to surreptitiously take a quick drag off my vape without anyone, any children, noticing.

We were almost to the restaurant's front doors. A family of four—two parents, who were older, two sons around 11—had just appeared behind us, stepping onto the paved white walkway from the parking lot. I quickly shoved my vape into my bag, trying to conceal it from the family of four, abandoning my nicotine mission for the sake of the children.

At this—at the sight of me unzipping and rezipping my tiny bag—one of their preteen sons broke into a sprint in order to run past us. I made eye contact with him. He paused next to us, looking back at his parents for reassurance, before running ahead again, throwing open the glass double doors, sprinting through the vestibule, and slamming his hand on the hostess counter. First!

This sequence of events gave me plenty of time to say plenty of stuff in earshot of the preteen son, who is already my height. "Yeah! Hurry or they might run out of food," I said to him sarcastically. I immediately regretted this phrase leaving my lips, since it sounded like a weight thing, rather than an oh, we're already playing the Hunger Games? thing. I'd also nobly resisted the impulse to trip him; if I hadn't, I would obviously be in jail right now.

I hate being bullied by kids, a general pet peeve. Kids are all too aware that people over the age of 18 have to play by totally different rules; kids might exploit this for laughs. As a result, I have not 'outgrown' being bullied by preteens. They know adults are legally held to certain standards of behavior and therefore cannot trip or otherwise antagonize other people's children on the sidewalk in front of a chain restaurant; to break this social contract would be insane. Just my saying anything to the child was a little insane.

So yes, congratulations: he'd 'beaten' two hobbling middle-aged white women and a small child to the hostess counter. A simple "oh, how embarrassing for you" out of me would've sufficed.

He breathlessly announced his family of four, with my best friend and me glowering at each other as the other three members of his family sauntered in casually behind us, sandwiching us between themselves and their all-important son. My best friend waited her turn to give a name and our party size. Then we stepped off to one side.

"Oh, my God," I said.

"Did you see how his parents smirked? Both of them," she said. She was barely able to contain her outrage.

I'd only witnessed his mom's smirk, but I had definitely seen his mom's smirk. "Well, they're proud. 'That's our son, he'll do anything for us.' He... he's their retirement plan."

I told a quick story about some stolen silverware—about how proud a matriarch had been, how eager she'd been to tell and retell the story, of someone, a young man, stealing silverware from a restaurant just because she'd said she liked it earlier. What a 'good' son; what a lovable matriarch.

"It makes me think of a guy in a pickup truck blasting past you, cutting you off in traffic, and you eventually pull up next to him at a red light, looking over at him like how's it going. Like, all this aggression—did you ever really get ahead? So a kid is going to grow up killing himself trying to get ahead of others, and if he doesn't get anywhere, he's going to internalize that shame, and his family is going to add to it, like, yeah, why aren't you more successful. I see it all laid out, the future, plain as day. It is so triggering. This is a dysfunctional family model in Bowen Family Systems—" and I began to evaluate the dynamic at a very reasonable volume.

Then I excused myself and left the restaurant, pressed myself against the brick wall outside, and took three long drags off my vape. I went back inside. The family of four was gone, but so was my family.

I walked a little farther into the restaurant and craned my head around.

"I think they went that way," said a young woman, barely out of her teens, who was waiting with a much larger party. My stomach lurched as I realized how many enormous families were sitting in the waiting area behind the hostess counter, continuing to wait for a table.

"Bless you, thank you," I said to her with a certain graveness. I proceeded in the direction the young woman had indicated, but I was immediately intercepted by a hostess, menus in hand, guiding my best friend and her daughter out of that part of the restaurant.

"Oops, I was just texting you," said my friend. "They accidentally seated us in the wrong area."

I had a prickling suspicion that the boys' parents didn't want to be seated near us, had perhaps quietly asked that my friend and her daughter be reseated—which could only be a good thing, because I wasn't finished talking about toxic interpersonal dynamics. "Oh, good," I said in relief. I followed them to the complete opposite side of the restaurant and got cozy.

"So there's a golden child and a scapegoat," I continued, opening my menu to look at it. "The golden child is sent out into the world as the family's representative, their emissary, to make a name for the family. Then he eventually returns to the family with riches or notoriety, to the family's praise and adulation." Hail the conquering hero.

"If he also drags back a bride," I continued, "the matriarch will systematically dismantle her." I sighed, thinking about the emotional climax of Crazy Rich Asians, the game of Mahjong, pregnant with meaning. I thought about how sad it is that love ultimately prevails in that movie, since this happy ending doesn't reflect reality at all. The protagonist is too Americanized, the 'wrong type' of person, to ever be welcomed into the fold: The family sees itself as an empire. The grieving girlfriend's powerful display, her willingness to sacrifice her own scarce resources for the good of the family, will never be taken in good faith; the golden child will be needled to 'pick a side' forevermore. It's the Lovers card. I thought about the British Royal Family.

"Hi... sorry to interrupt. I'm Heidi, and I'll be taking care of you today," a slightly older woman chirped at us.

"Yeah," I said. Yeah? What the hell? I closed my menu and tuned in.

"I can take down your drinks now, or if you're ready to order, I'll take down your whole meal," Heidi continued. "Do you need a little more time?"

"We... need a little more time," said my best friend, fully flustered.

She offered to bring us infinite breadsticks while we looked. Would that be okay?

"Yeah!" I said. The others at the table were equally enthusiastic. Heidi left us, embarking on her quest.

"Now, is there a cultural aspect to this dynamic?" I continued. "This has actually been studied. Ultimately the answer is no, but you can couch a justification for this toxic dynamic in tradition, 'traditional values', family values." That is, using cultural identity to deflect any critiques of unhealthy patterns: This is just how we do it. "And the generational trauma continues," I said wearily. I said something about fully committing to a perpetual-victim narrative to justify being a flagrant, antisocial dick.

I trailed off. The studies had been missing a key point, hadn't they? Now I was thinking about repeated knocks to an immigrant family's wealth and dignity. Of course generations ago, the family had opted to "close ranks," to become tribal, as a matter of their own survival. From my perspective, they were operating on outdated information. But were they really? The thought gave me pause. I hesitated, considering this.

Weeks ago I had admitted to the family, "I am trying to be less territorial about my food in the pantry." I apologized for this and thanked them for their patience as I navigated my own struggles. I explained that, with active, debilitating gastroparesis, if everyone else ate from my pantry food stash, I'd be left with nothing to eat—while the rest of the family could continue to eat anything they happened to find in the pantry.

But circumstances had since changed; my digestion had drastically improved. "My body is physiologically reacting to outdated information," I'd said at the time. Then I'd paused, thinking about this. "That's actually true of every trigger, every childhood wound, if you think about it," I mused out loud. "Just a nervous-system reaction to old, outdated information." The same is likely true of generational wounds, too.

Unfortunately, the argument for a family "closing ranks" becomes self-fulfilling: "Every time that kid races someone to a restaurant and the person reacts," I was saying now, "the whole family will feel vindicated. Yes, the world is a cruel place. That's certainly true; their son is spreading that sad lesson to everyone he encounters." I sighed. I had inadvertently contributed to a narrative that could potentially harm further generations. "I wish I hadn't reacted at all," I said to my best friend now. "Or maybe I wish I'd said more, louder, and that I'd said it directly to his parents." I frowned and looked down at the table, torn between two extremes.

"The world is going to become more and more like this," I said to my best friend very slowly now, pointed and pained, and I looked up at her again, "more narcissistic and self-serving. I don't know about this war in Iran or what it'll do to the price of gasoline, for instance, but I think you'll start encountering this same behavior at the gas pumps." Resource scarcity typically brings out a collective's worst impulses. "So the question becomes, how do you remain kind, how do you remain principled, while standing your ground and refusing to let other people mow you down." My best friend, wide-eyed, nodded.

Heidi returned with a first wave of breadsticks. As she slid an empty bread plate toward me, I caught myself gazing, just for a moment, at her forearm. She had a full-arm tattoo sleeve. It wasn't brand new, but a lot of the ink looked really fresh. Either she had the color and linework regularly touched up, or she diligently treated her skin with some sort of unctuous color-enhancing emollient at night. Possibly both things. I was transfixed.

The six-year old dove into the bread basket.

"Ow!" she screamed. She dropped the breadstick where it was and put her fingertip in her mouth.

"Oh, good," I said, "that's a good thing. Piping-hot breadsticks, fresh out of the oven. Yum." My skin burns easy, so I folded my hands atop the table. The little one did the same.

"Ow!" my best friend said, taking the breadstick out of her mouth. We looked at each other and started laughing. "Can't take us anywhere," my friend said of herself and her daughter, shaking her head as she went for the glass of water.

Heidi returned to take our order. My best friend wanted an old version of something that was no longer on the menu. Heidi informed us they secretly still had it.

We heard a distant, but distinct, "vroom vroom." My best friend and I fell silent. The engine's revving repeated; it was a recording. My best friend looked around. I examined Heidi.

"Ignore that," Heidi said. Acquiescing to her command, I pinned my mouth shut, tears springing to my eyes. She peeked over at me. Our eyes met; I was trying to contain myself. Now she looked apologetic. "I... ride a Harley," she finally said.

I nodded. "Those are... very popular in Lake Geneva," I managed to say. Heidi and I stared at each other. My lips were pressed together, my eyes absolutely glittering, and so were hers. Idiots would think this was flirting, but Stephen King called it 'shining'. It's real, and it's very much a product of two people trying to remain normal in public.

"I thought that sound was coming out of this!" my best friend said, pointing at the on-table credit card processing gadget.

"I was beginning to suspect it was your ringtone," I said quietly, chewing on the corners of my mouth so that I wouldn't start laughing. Heidi started to speak, stopped herself, started again, stopped herself, took my order, and hurried away. All of us were absolutely fried.

The next day I'd be standing at the kitchen sink, pronouncing an ode to Heidi, articulating just how much I love her.

"You could see her twisting on the vine, so torn between playing her role as a server, and just wanting to tell us everything there is to know about Harleys. I love this tension. I was trying to be so good, I did not egg her on at all, but more than anything I wanted her to sit down in the chair next to me, completely blow off work, and tell me everything she ever wanted to tell someone about Harleys, her journeys." At this, my best friend and her father would explode into giggles. Hee hee hee!

"You know," I said in the restaurant, "at the start of the day I was really committed to this idea of grounding my nervous system, totally self-regulating, and in this regard today has been a total fail. Today is like," and I illustrated riding the peaks and valleys of an emotional rollercoaster with my right hand. My best friend nodded emphatically, because yes, the day had indeed been wildin'. "It's like, as soon as you're like 'I'm ready for a test', the Universe goes, oh yeah? A test of self-regulation? Here you go," and now I acted out throwing a bunch of invisible rocks, or breadsticks, at an individual—the universe unloading its kitchen sink. I'd gotten absolutely buried under emotional dodgeballs.

I opened the off-brand Playbill from the matinee and began reading from it, mostly silently. Anything notable, though, I read aloud. One of the actors had credits from both The Goodman and Steppenwolf ("I thought that was just a band," my best friend said).

I love the cast bios. "This is my favorite part," I told her, "ever since I was a kid."

"You want to see their other credits," she said.

"Well, no," I said, "I want to see what credits people think are important to share. They have a limited amount of space on the page, how do they choose to use it?"

I'd developed an instant, intense vendetta against one of the actors, the one who'd done a really obnoxious ad-lib, ruffling my feathers enough to produce an immediate, longstanding grudge. "Ugh! He finished his bio with the name of his alma mater," I said, frowning. I read his cast bio out loud, putting a special emphasis on the last lines.

"Is that good?" she asked me, of his alma mater.

"It isn't anything!" I'd exclaimed, confused and distressed by this detail. "He might've been trying to pad his bio out, to be honest."

Heidi rolled up with our food. My best friend's plate looked amazing, and I sniffed the air and said so. I closed the program and set it aside.

"Hey!" Heidi said. "Are you guys going to see that?"

"We just came from it," my best friend told her.

"I keep seeing people coming from that," she said. "Maybe I'll see it. How is it?"

"I cried straight through it," I told her. "Blindsided."

"Oh you... sweet thing," Heidi gasped, regarding me.

I thought about saying everything I wanted to say about the show—how we'd sat in the paraplegic section, the family next to us signing in ASL, the note in the program that "theater is for everyone!" and how overwhelmed I was, not in a superior or supercilious way, at the thought that this was a lot of people's first Broadway musical, that the touring company's pared-down ensemble had exactly fit onstage, that everything had been scaled down for the strange dimensions of that small stage, how generous it all seemed, the swells of collective feeling in the room, the way everyone had dressed up, the gasps from the child next to me, the cast bios, feeling everyone's feelings—but I pinned my lips shut, looking I think very sad, or wistful. We stared at each other for several silent seconds.

"Maybe I'll see it," Heidi mused out loud. Then she said, very seriously, "I want to cry." Then she considered this statement, evaluating what she might've meant by that. "Wait, no I don't," she exclaimed.

I clapped both hands over my mouth, keeping my laughter contained, and we both stared, wet-eyed, at each other.

Girrrrrl this is why I had a drinking problem all those years. Heidi and I could close out a bar, getting increasingly slurry, staggering out propped up against each other, my God. Instead, if I ever come back to this restaurant, I'll surely ask if Heidi is working, because maybe she will tell me about Harley motorcycles, a little at a time, meted out in an organic, well-paced, thrilling way.

In the car heading home my best friend finally said to me, "I hope you like it here."

She probably meant, could I ever feel comfortable, surrounded by so many people who believe such different things to my beliefs. My friend in Scotland, alternatively, recently asked if I felt safe here. I was astonished. Finally I'd told her yes, but I hadn't elaborated.

"Are you kidding?" I said to my best friend. "What happened in front of the restaurant is the first time I've ever been upset." Most people here are not randomly waging war on their neighbors. Not yet, anyway¹.

At least this place was nothing like our hometown, though!! Now I was thinking out loud about childhood. "It's why [my adoptive mom] took a job in our school district," I said, remembering how she'd moved into the local high school, to my abject horror. "The narrative had been that I was a bad kid. I was being harassed, tortured. By adults! By all the other adults! She blew in and changed the narrative, finessed the narrative. Thanks to her, now I was just a misunderstood genius. Now everyone was on my side." I scoffed, shaking my head. She'd successfully forced her dysfunctional 'golden child' story onto the entire independent school district, an even greater burden on me than the scapegoat story from before. My college roommate's nickname for my adoptive mom had been "Force of Nature." And she was: a stage mom; a tiger mom.

"It was all the moms," my best friend said sternly. She reminded me: Many of the teachers at our elementary school had grown up in town, had gone to school at the same time, were all part of the same original 'hometown' crew. I'd posed some sort of weird threat to their kids.

"They closed ranks," I said, nodding. My own parent had infiltrated, dominated, made them look stupid. Cheerleading and rodeo moms playing small-town games weren't ready for her. God, it was mortifying.

My best friend's mom had gone to school with all those other moms, too, but for a variety of reasons this had not conferred the same sort of social safety net onto my friend. She'd never been perceived as being 'from' there, either, even though she quite literally was.

I'm not sure when she and I had begun hatching a plot to escape our hometown; I'm just grateful that she wasn't turned off by my weird Yankee accent.

Once we got home, I folded myself over, so that I was simultaneously standing up and facedown in my best friend's mom's bed. "I'm done," I said into the rumpled bedsheets. Eventually I crawled into my own bed where I slept for four hours.