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Embarrassing Families

by Lara on August 29th, 2008

Sometimes we find ourselves in situations with family where we become the subject of the day’s embarrassment. Fortunately, my family’s not been too harsh on me ever, but I remember a Thanksgiving at an ex-boyfriend’s house once that mortified me for his sister.

She’d gone through some really major issues with her marriage and divorce, and had been awarded a very large sum of money in divorce court. The first issue is that the family thinks she could’ve gotten more had she done things differently, but the bottom line is that she blew through every penny in no time, and then found herself in a really bad situation with income tax and debt she couldn’t pay. This had happened a while before, so the very thought that it was being brought up at that particular moment made little sense to me, but there I sat, the only “outsider” to the family, watching this woman get mangled over her poor choices by the people who you’d normally think would’ve been her biggest supporters.

Sure, she made some mistakes. She was now in a really bad position, and I can even understand the whole “tough love” idea, but there was absolutely nothing she could do to reverse things. You can’t go back in time, right?

At one point during the night, she went outside for a cigarette and asked if I wanted to come with her. There weren’t many smokers in the family and at the time I was, so I went. I felt so bad for her… she had tears in her eyes and she was mortified that the first time she met me (she lived out of town) that her whole story was laid out there like that. I didn’t have anything to say to her, really. I mean, the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t at all concerned with how what I’d heard may or may not have been a true character reflection. I’m the kind of person to judge people not by their whole lives, not by their mistakes, but by the way they treat me personally. Maybe that’s wrong, or maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.

She wasn’t crying because of the embarrassment, but rather the situation she was in and the fact that her family had hammered her so much about getting her act together and how they wanted her to move back home. But her kids were elsewhere, and even though they lived with their rich father, she felt like coming home would be abandoning them. I didn’t know what to say except, “You have to do what’s best for you, and your kids. But if you’re not doing the best for you, you absolutely CAN’T do the best for your kids.”

So later on that night when we were alone, the then boyfriend asked me what I thought of the family. All I could say was that I hoped that none of them ever got to know enough about me to be able to put me in that position at a family dinner like that. I assured him that he’d never witness something like that at any of my family events, and I was grateful for that, because I wouldn’t want him to see that! All he could do was laugh a little, and tell me, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

If you’d like to ask for advice or share a dysfunctional story, send an email to me at lara.kulpa@b5media.com. Again, I guarantee you strict confidence and security here, so just tell it like it is when you’re with the family at a holiday dinner and drop me a line!

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POSTED IN: All In The Family