Fall Out

Dear Robin,
After our phone conversation, I feel like I should start over and write something different. Just talking to you made me feel good and so over this stuff, but I did spend the better part of my evening putting this down, so…

I wasn’t going to write about this, but I don’t think I can move on from my own feelings if I don’t vent them out to someone. So, here goes:

Adrienne came home from school on Monday in a mood.

She walked in and slammed the door then approached me with tear-filled eyes. I asked her what was wrong and she exploded, “What did you and Daddy do to make everyone hate us?”

Wow. Loaded question. What in the world was she talking about?

After a few questions, I figure it out.

She was referring to communion and more specifically to communion parties.
Earlier in the day, the first day back to school after communion, Adrienne’s teacher set aside time for a “show and tell” (if you will) of after-communion activities. Each student got to “brag” about how many relatives came in to visit, what kind of food or cake was served, what special message your God Parents gave you, what kinds of gifts you received, and etc. The process of communion is part of their religion grade and family tradition related to communion is part of the curriculum. In the teacher’s defense, I can see how such an activity would be totally relevant and possibly a good way to “close” the event.

One thing you should know about Adrienne is that she does not like to be upstaged or out done. I don’t mean this in an arrogant or mean way, nor do I imply that Adrienne is competitive. I just mean that she, in the least, likes to be like everyone else. She absolutely DOES NOT want to be the one person that didn’t have a big after-communion gathering or that didn’t have God Parents present.

So, in school, in front of her whole class, she cried when one of her classmates told of her party that was too big for her house—a party that had to be held at the country club with a cake that looked like a wedding cake, and with God Parents that flew in from California.

This same classmate acquired 62 gifts which in addition to traditional plaques, rosaries, and bibles, also included cash--$832 (according to this classmate).

When Adrienne was telling me about this country club party, through sobs I might add, my imagination got the best of me. I pictured some over-the-top MTV style communion where Ozzy and Sharon Osborne are the God Parents and the first communicant gets a scooter that looks like a motorcycle as a gift from the celebs. Or better yet, it’s Courtney Cox and David Arquette and David gets drunk on the cheap country club champagne and smears the communion cake that looks like wedding cake all over another guest and so not to ruin it anymore, they start throwing cash.

At one point, lost in my own rendition of this little girl’s event, I laughed out loud.

Big mistake. Adrienne stomped off to her bedroom (and slammed that door, too)yelling that I don’t understand how she feels, that I don’t care how she feels and then, “Everybody had a better party than me!”

Instead of going after Adrienne, I stayed seated in the living room for a few minutes, thinking.

To an outsider, it might seem as if Adrienne was jealous of the gifts and the cake or jealous of the country club or jealous of something else. I was tempted to think the same thing. But after a bit of reflection, I thought otherwise.

Here’s the thing: Adrienne, as the second child, is always on the lookout for what Andrew got that she isn’t getting. That does make her a scorekeeper about a lot of things. But in addition to that, just by her sheer nature, she is perceptive. She sees and hears, notices and processes all things going on around her. She can sniff out authenticity as easily as she can detect insincerity.

Now, I am not implying that my in-laws were insincere in their visit, but I have mentioned that our relationship is superficial. And I think for the first time, Adrienne noticed it too. So, when they came and left in a whirlwind, Adrienne got her feathers ruffled—her feelings hurt.

Despite her sharp perceptions and her outgoing personality, she is not one to point out when she is feeling hurt. She glosses over it, “puts on a good face,” and focuses on something else (like the cute little cakes we had) until something happens that makes it hard to hold in her disappointment anymore.

The country club party wasn’t the only thing that did it. It was everyone in class who shared a story of a laughing, loving visitor—an adult who sat at the table and told stories about their own first communion or kicked a soccer ball around the yard with the cousins, of flew in from California because that’s what God Parents do. This is what they taught in school about communion. Attached to the ceremony is a family full of tradition and full of excitement for you to make this holy sacrament.

Her emotions came from the fact that in class, for the first time, she was faced with the reality of her family compared to her perceived notions of everyone else.

She wanted Eric’s mom to not be sick or to suspend her grieving of her sister in law for a few hours. She wanted all the other relatives on the invitation list to send some kind of acknowledgement, she wanted Eric’s partner’s wife (her God mother) to find the time to come to see her in her dress. She wanted my mom or dad to tell some kind of story about her when she was little or about me when I was little. She wanted someone to make her experience like what her textbook and the teachers told her it would be like—what her friends in class confirmed.

Everyone gave Adrienne money and gifts, which was so nice. But Adrienne is a tough cookie. That stuff is only good enough if you bring your best self along with it. She was disappointed, not jealous.

I opened the door to her room and found her wrapped up in a white fluffy blanket, communion dress still laid out flat on the floor from the night before.

After a few minutes I was finally able to talk to her about how we don’t control other people in whether or not they can come to a communion party and we certainly can’t control the way people act when they come to our house, but we do have control over ourselves and we can choose to look our life situations in ways that make us happy and not ways that make us sad.

I said this more for my own benefit than for hers. Practice what you preach? Yea…I’ll work on it.