Old Friends

Postmodern identity means fragmented identity, which means a different part of our selves will be emphasized in any given interaction, depending on a million different variables including who we're interacting with (yes I know this is not correct grammar). No this is not Postmodernism 101, though it's probably not a coincidence that this is on my mind given that I'm about to start the fall quarter of a class I teach that deals with the very topic of "the decentered" American subject.

But I digress...Having a few drinks tonight with an old friend got me thinking about what we reveal to people and how that shapes our perception of each other. My friend and I have known each other since probably the fourth grade when we played softball together. But tonight I realized I'd kept a lot of my family-related angst from her, partially I guess because I'm still working on understanding it myself, partly because I wanted to maintain the illusion that we were "the same." After all, we're both female, we're both white with nondescript brown hair. We have freckles and fair skin. We took all the same classes in high school and got relatively similar grades, with me doing marginally better in the humanities and her in math and science. She's more athletic, I'm more "artsy." We both grew up in a middle-class suburb; we went to the same college. We've both gone on to pursue advanced degrees. So by now you get it: we're a lot alike. Except that her family is college educated and mine has a history of alcohol abuse. For years, it was very important to me to protect the sense that we were the same becaue it seemed to be injurious somehow to my family to suggest that they were not the same, that they did not meet the universalized standard of the "typical American family." In college, the differences between our families became more difficult to mask, primarily because my father died, increasing the emotional and financial instability of my family. So I selectively edited my life for my "normal" suburban friends with "normal," in tact families. I saved the drama of my real life for the friends I thought would understand without pity because they had irregular families themselves. These new college friends wouldn't feel sorry for me because I used to be "normal" like them. I could tell spill it all because they didn't know me "before the fall." I could even tell them that in fact my family had never been "normal."

But tonight for some reason, I blabbed to my old friend. Of course, she already knew a lot, I'm sure. It was her parents that had to move me home from college in the summer because my mom was having a second adolescence. I suspect my mom called her mom occasionally while drinking a bottle or two of wine, so her alcoholism was probably not much of a secret. But telling her tonight about the aftermath that a norm-breaking family poses a woman my age gave me a momentary sense of cohesion: my divided self felt fleetingly conjoined as I fessed up that we were, after all, different.