family matters

“Where are you headed today?”

A cute TSA employee strikes up a conversation with me as I wait for the conveyor to push my laptop through the scanner.

“Chicago.”

“Is Chicago home?”

No, he’s not cute, he’s out-of-place-for-airport-security dashing; this guy… this guy can frisk me, no problem.

“No, New York is home, but my family is in Chicago.”

“How long will you be there for?”

I raise my eyebrows, “A month.”

“A month! Now that’s some visit!”

“Well, my mom is sick and I want to go help her out.”

He’s flirty. Maybe slightly unprofessional, but I’m not filing a complaint anytime soon.

“Did she talk you into that?”

“No,” I raise my eyes to deliver the line straight on, “I’m just a really good daughter.”

We laugh. His smile is dazzling. How nice. On four hours of sleep, hungover, with no caffeine or food in my system, I am surprisingly chipper. Perhaps I am still drunk. The rest of the journey to the airplane is like this. Everyone seems more polite than usual. People are extraordinarily courteous. I see strangers talking, making connections, expressing gratitude. Holiday music piping through the terminal, perhaps they are all drunk on the season, now unabashedly in full swing post Thanksgiving weekend.

I am leaving one family to go to another. My soul is juiced up after an unexpectedly super fantastic six days in LA. I yoga’d it up, I sashayed for hours beachside, drank far too much alcohol and even more green juice trying to counterbalance it. I had a birthday, a reading, Thanksgiving with friends and family Hollywood Hills dinners. I bowled a strikingly (pardon the pun) awesome 167 at the Lucky Strike lanes. For my birthday I received the new Jonathan Franzen book and a deliciously sweet truffle of a weekend romance.

Several of my closest friends have moved here—it started five years ago with my bestie Broadway veteran Adam…simply the most charming, charismatic person I have ever known. Period. The West Coast has propelled him to the brink of interior design reality show stardom and he leads me around like a trophy fag hag, which I am more than proud to be.

The wave continues with David and Logan who for a solid seven years (along with our relocated Vermonter Tesha) were so close, they were not my crew. They were, they are, my tribe. At one point we coined ourselves ‘lodamate.’ T-shirts were made. I’m not kidding.

So with the mass exodus West, what’s a girl to do but head for a visit?

My amazon goddess oneness sistah Katie was trying LA on for size, there were yogis peppered everywhere and friends I adore from high school are here I didn’t even get a chance to see, the schedule was so packed.

Being with friends like this is being with family. These are the people who with ridiculous generosity offer, “Here take the keys to this apartment, we’ll stay together and you can stay there for free.” They respond to pick up requests without a moment’s hesitation: “of course.” They will brew you a pot of coffee when they have a house full of guests arriving to entertain and your lazy, tired ass should have made it to Starbucks on the way there. They have your back. This kind of love, the connection, the support, is what life is all about. I think of the yogis I met in India, who would fall in love and abandon their own continents to be with each other—I mean, that is an incredibly deep knowing. When you find this, you hold fast to it. You vacation together, you move to be near each other, it IS family.

As the jet-stream glides me eastward away from them, so grateful for the week I have had, my thoughts transition to this month with my “real” family. There is the old Ram Dass adage thrown around: “if you think you are so enlightened, go spend a week with your parents.” A month in my mother’s home will be the longest I have spent there in seventeen years. I’m not planning to lubricate the situation by running out for a case of holiday season Belvedere (our family is essentially sponsored by the vodka) but am instead placing my mother, sister and I on a one week cleanse and juice fast to start, which is going to stir up every irritability that ever existed in any of us. This will quite literally be, my most in-depth spiritual retreat.

Because the thing about family is, the comfort and the warmth and the ease that all the familiarity brings can also rear its ugly head as the place we feel most comfortable to be our nastiest selves. Often times our parents or siblings can bring things up in us, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that are the biggest thorns in our lattisumus dorsi. Something comes from one of their mouths that could be processed quite palatably from a stranger, but because our mother says it, there is all of this “stuff” attached to it.: expectation, charges of emotional hurt from the past. Discomfort when we don’t see eye to eye or they nag us for something we want to do or a way we want to be.

I joke with the TSA guy, and I joke here, but I’m pretty dead on serious when I label this a spiritual retreat. I fully expect to learn more about myself in a suburban Chicago household than I would spending a month in India with my teachers.

It’s leaning into the fire. Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön has a whole book titled “The Wisdom of No Escape” that speaks to this theory and practice. I will purposely be reaching for the irritations so that I can see how I react to them, notice this, and then in that inherent way that bringing attention to something and actually experiencing it rather than avoiding it dissipates it, this will be a month long meditative process.

Of course I go with excitement and love. I am fueled by the comfort and generosity I have with my tribe, to extend it to my family. Intending to learn and grow from any holiday stress that arises lets us all off the hook a little bit, doesn’t it? The world is a little jollier this month, decorated a little sparklier, as selfishness always seems to be ratcheted down a notch… And if everyone entered the season heart open, with a sprinkling of self-inquiry on mind, wouldn’t that make for a more enlightened December? Tonight the ladies of my family will feast, this weekend we will famine. I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the opportunities in love with those nearest to me in this life.

6:30am the next morning (4:30am LA time) my sister’s alarm in the next room agonizingly rousts me out of a dream, twice, from my best sleep in a week. "Why the f**k is a spaceship is landing in my room?!" I shuffle to her room intercepting the silence before the 3rd snooze. Desperately tired and annoyed beyond reason that she can sleep through the sci-fi, space-age, musically whirling futuristic noise that is her cell phone alarm clock, I am exhausted and murderous. I hate that she can sleep through anything; I hate that I cannot. I hate that she has to go to work this morning… "Doesn’t she realize that as my younger sister she should be sensitive and subservient to my every comfort and desire??," my thoughts mutter to themselves… opportunities for love... deep breath... stand-by… and… go.