I spent the weekend at the Corrigan Compound, a collection of cabins and campgrounds in BFE Delosa where my wife’s family owns some dirt-cheap property and spends the weekend before or after July Fourth. This year they had an astonishing 30-something people show up notably including both of Clancy’s sisters, Ellie and Zoey.
I’ve met Zoey on a few occasions. She came up to Deseret with the family, she was at our wedding, and she had attended previous Corrigan Compound celebrations. Zoey and I have almost nothing in common. In fact, she has next to nothing in common with her sisters and to some extent her family as a whole. She’s a former athlete, was popular in high school, and seems to consider herself somewhat internationale rather than a product of where she came from. But despite all that, we get along and I like her. There’s very little not to like about her, actually.
The middle sister Ellie is something of a different story. Clancy’s relationship with Ellie was always more complicated than her relationship with Zoey. Ellie and Clancy have many of the wrong things in common: the stubbornness and temper they get from their father. And not to put too fine a point on it, Ellie had a rebellious and even something of a mean streak to her growing up. They were only two years apart in age and both ended up going to the University of Koroa. More recently she refused to be a bridesmaid at our wedding due to her distaste for wedding ceremonies (she was married at 3am by a JP).
I’ve only met Ellie once and I had other things on my mind as that was the weekend I was getting married. Everything I’d been told about Ellie made me somewhat glad of that fact. Not only had she been a historically difficult person to be around, Ellie has a very black-and-white view of the world that me and people like me are very much on the black side of. I was reluctant to leave my home town and home state and would be hard-pressed to ever live abroad, I’ve worked in the oil industry, I have a spotty and unambitious employment history, I grew up on money that Dad made working for the Department of Defense, and I have some relatively conservative views on marriage and family. She’s an avowed communist, crusading environmental lawyer, sometimes more proud of her Russian citizenship than her American citizenship and currently living in the Philippines. Between Clancy and I both there was the sense that I probably wouldn’t measure up when and if we finally did meet.
Shortly before our wedding her ex-husband Sergei (an MD) set her up on some anti-depressants which had started to make a difference. She was civil at the wedding, though I got the sense that she was working hard to restrain herself around me. She made some impolite comments to Clancy about our decision not to live together until we were married, but that was about the extent of it. She even commented that she felt that I was a good match for Clancy, though that could possibly have been a backhanded smack at her rather than a compliment at me.
The drugs have apparently helped her out a great deal. She even moved to the industrial midwest to live with her husband (prior to that she and he always lived in separate cities), though they ended up divorcing shortly thereafter. Her relations with Clancy and the rest of the family improved and she just became all-around more agreeable. After relocating to the Philippines, she remarried a local and she-who-dislikes-children became a step-mother.
Even with all of these changes I was still a little more than nervous about meeting her this past weekend. For every upshot there was a sign that she might not have changed all that much. She remarried, but once again only informed her family afterwards and combined with her failed (and unusual) first marriage I actually wondered if she might be remarrying as some sort of poke-in-the-eye at the concept of marriage. So… I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
Much to my surprised, it turns out that Ellie and I connect in a way that I don’t connect with Zoey. I indulged her in her favorite game “What would you rather?”, which Clancy never liked and has understandably refused to play since one round several years ago she asked Zoey whether she’d rather have to spend all day stuck in a car with their father (not a pleasant experience) or be a bridesmaid in Clancy’s wedding (they both said the latter, though the whole incident was salt in the wound when Ellie announced a couple weeks later that she wouldn’t be a bridesmaid out of moral objection). Honestly, despite the uncomfortable history with the game, I actually enjoyed it. We got into some philosophical discussions.
It also became apparent that she really did love her new husband and was distraught at the possibility that he might not be able to get a visa into the US. She even agreed to wear a wedding band (Sergei asked her to wear one, but she steadfastly refused). She even smiled when she talked about her step-kids. It’s pretty obvious that she and I will never see eye-to-eye, but she’s at least become someone that I want to like and that seems to want to like me as well. Though I think we both held our tongues about certain things, there were nonetheless all sorts of things to talk about and thoughts to share.
So if I’ve got a list of things in life to dread and endure, I’m at the point that I can scratch her off of it. I actually look forward to seeing her again, though it may be a while before she makes her way back to her native country.
What makes a child turn out so vastly different in philosophy, temperament, attitudes, etc than her siblings or parents? I always wonder how that happens. Is it a middle-child/Jan Brady thing, where growing up they become jealous of the favorite older sister and cute younger sister?
I also wonder how it is parents don’t see this coming at a young age, and why they are unable (or unwilling) to do something to arrest it while it’s still formative. Maybe there was nothing anyone could have done in Clancy’s family. Maybe it just happens. Who knows.
I just know I worry about things like that with my kids sometimes - I’m so close to them, and they are to me..I can’t imagine one of them growing up someday and having values and ideas so vastly different than my own that they would choose to separate themselves so completely from the family (at least for a time).
Comment by Barry — July 11, 2007 @ 8:20 am
Not to get all freudian, but Clancy and Ellie (and to a lesser extent Zoey) had a well-meaning but often very difficult father growing up and a lot of their personalities seem to have been formed in part as a reaction to that. As hard as it is for me to believe about my very outspoken wife, for the longest time Clancy quiet, passive, and reluctantly obedient. Ellie’s reaction was much more confrontational in a Goddardesque sort of way. Further complicating things is that they both temperamentally take after the rigid father they were so frequently butting heads with. The ambition and discipline made them a doctor and lawyer respectively, which is impressive, but both have to work to temper their instincts (I have to do the same regarding the traits I picked up from my mother). Zoey dealt with a much more laid back father and got more of her traits from her mother, so she sidestepped a lot of the problems that plagued Clancy and Ellie in adolescence and beyond.
To answer your question — or fail to answer it, actually — it’s hard to say what causes it. There’s often not as clear an explanation as there is in the Himmelreich family, like the Collins family I’ve posted on before producing two wayward children (but then there may have been things about that family that I didn’t know) that seemed perfectly normal until high school.
On a micro-issue, I think that one important thing is to live the values you preach. If you want your kids to understand the importance of family, do everything you can to produce a family life that your kids would want to replicate. If you want them to grow up Christian, introduce them into Christian communities that they will want to be a part of. It’s all absurdly easier said than done, of course, but it does seem that a disproportionate number of rebellious kids from involved parents take the attitude “You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to understand it, you just have to do it” that is ripe for contradiction in high school, college, and beyond. Granted my parents had a lot of rules and such I disagreed with and/or didn’t understand, but as the saying goes your parents get smarter as you grow up and you start finding out that they often really did know what they were talking about.
Comment by trumwill — July 11, 2007 @ 10:00 am
I was really going to let loose on this rigid, self-righteous little snot, until I got to the end. It was kind of a cheat, because you worked me up to a froth then got all nice about her.
(grumble) OK, I guess people can change. Good to know.
Comment by Spungen — July 12, 2007 @ 11:08 pm