FUN Day: Or Fricking UNcomfortable Day

Like most families, mine practices the ancient art of dysfunction, and my mother is our shaman. By the time I was fifteen, she’d been married five times with my father holding the glittering crown of Lucky #2. Of course, he was a prince, my mother being his second princess, after which he moved on to marry Princesses #3 and #4. That makes – count them on both hands – four dads and three mothers and a smattering of siblings in a pear tree.

Now, add in a sprinkle of abandonment and a splash of bitterness, and you’ve got a serious recipe for FUN at the holidays. I’m talking the kind of FUN that shows up to the party with a bottle of Southern Comfort and dances on the table until somebody gets a black eye.

Even though we are manic well-adjusted adults, nobody comes home for FUN Day without their matched 6-piece Louis Vuitton WalMart special 3-pieces-for-$99 luggage set.

For example, say you haven’t seen your mom in a few months, and she hasn’t bothered to call you in all that time to see if you’re alive. After an obligatory hello, she proceeds to pretty much ignore your existence like you are a zit on the backside of society.

At said moment, you may unexpectedly experience an odd sensation – the welling of three decades of disappointment, love, and salty bitterness clawing its way up the back of your throat and trying to escape out of your mouth in the monstrous form of a verbal tongue-lashing that would make the Terminator weep. The evil Terminator, not the reprogrammed one in the sequels. You clamp your lips shut, biting them bloody to hold the monster at bay. Because you are a mad pissed-off secure woman.

And, lo and behold, who is this knightess coming in to save you from yourself? Your sister, gleaming in all her jewelry and the pair of boots she thinks her husband doesn’t know she bought. She swoops in, tosses a kid at your hip, and distracts you with a sparkly, snide comment. The witchy monster melts under a deluge of laughter and disappears.

Later, you tell you your sister, “So remember FUN Day? Yeah, I was kind of hating on Mom. Not the real kind of hate, but more the I-momentarily-regressed-to-a-little-girl-why-can’t-she-love-me-the-way-I-want kind of hate.”

And she says, “Really? I didn’t even notice,” and you say, “That’s cause I’m a garbage compressor, and I have the mad ability to stuff my emotions down like yesterday’s trash,” and she’s all, “Seek therapy,” and you eye her all judgey and knowingly until she says, “Yeah, you’re right. You’d never fit in with the family if you were, like, normal” and you sit back, feeling all mighty and vindicated.

Then she smiles and says, “At least you have me,” and you’re all, “Yeah, you’re a prize,” and she says, “Shut up, jerk,” and your eyes meet with all the love you don’t always say out loud cause it’s the kind of love that saves you from witchy monsters and things that go bump in your childhood.

Instead, you go shopping for more boots your sister will hide from your brother-in-law and hit the MAC counter to have them do up a day look that looks more like FUN’s night look. And under all the laughter, you’re both thinking the same thing. “Woo! Christmas is coming! Let’s hear it for FUN Day.”