Lunch at the Cuckoo's Nest

You know your family is fucked up when you work in the human service field and the most stressful part of your day was having lunch with your own family members.

My dad loaned me his laptop while I was recovering from my tonsillectomy. He wanted to pick it up and have lunch at the same time on Tuesday. Unfortunately, as I have mentioned before my sister lives in the same town that I do. My “crazy Dad calls me last week and says “Your mother made me call your sister and invite her to lunch too”. I thought “OK, its just lunch, how bad could it be?”

It was two worlds of dysfunction in my life colliding at once—and exploding in slow motion. Dad had told me before that he had some stuff he wanted to talk about. I thought after he invited my sister he wouldn’t approach topics of any depth. You can’t have a coherent conversation with my sister. It is literally impossible. It becomes free association of what ever you are talking about with whatever physical ailment it reminds my sister of—like if you mention a food, she has to tell you how sick it makes her or how allergic she is to it.

We met at local café here in town—one of dad’s favorite places to eat. We get a booth. One of the first statements out of dad’s mouth is “how come three out of four of my children are in therapy?” It all goes down hill from there. My sister doesn’t remember that our brother was in therapy in for depression...she immediately asks why our other brother, the sanest of all of us is in counseling. I have to tell he is not. She launches into how she is at least not on any kind of psychological medications like me or our brother. I say “why would it be so bad if you were on them?” She says “ I can’t be on them. They make my tremors too bad”. Apparently they interact with the myriad of other medications she is on for her tremors, fibromailgia , bone spurs, allergies, high cholesterol, asthma, migraines, and number of other ailments I don’t remember.

Then dad decides to touch on what I think is the worst possible topic to touch in the presence of my sister—his codependent, fucked up relationship with our mother. I think it was some sort of attempt to see if she could possibly be another ally for him. He says “A couple of weeks ago your mother said to me, if it came down to me or the house, she would take the house”, indicating that she would be more than willing to tell dad to get out if she had to. Dad had never discussed anything like this in front of my sister. She looked dumb founded. She went into some sort of spiel about how when she was living at home yet, mom would go into her room on Friday night after work and not come out again until Sunday night”. She thought it was because of the pain from mom’s fibroid tumor that “they did not have the $10.000 to pay for the surgery to remove”. Dad had no memory of this and believes that this may be another psychotic memory created by sister. The tumor was real—but he doubts Mom spent the whole weekend in her room. I could go either way on this one.

I am not even sure how we got to the next topic…could have been anything with my sister present. My sister and her husband tend to “see ghosts”. Now I would be less skeptical if it was just at their current residence but everywhere they live, there is some sort of apparition that appears. Usually several. She went into an elaborate description of a little girl ghost that lives in her current residence. Somehow, my sister knows the entire name of this thing-Pauline something Lemckee. And that this was the neighbors daughter and she died like 40 years ago. And that the people that use to live in her house didn’t have any children so they liked to have her come visit. And there is some adult male ghost that comes over to call Pauline back home and he is really mean and he has to be her father. And that Pauline was pushed down the stairs in the basement of her home and broke her neck. I asked her if she did some sort of research on this, if that is how she knows all of this detailed information. She says “no” she just knows. WHAT THE FUCK!! She says that she has had a repair guy that won’t come to the house without her there because he has seen her to. She says that she has seen our grandmother who died almost two years ago from the knees up doing dishes at her kitchen sink. I say “why don’t I get to see grandma”.

Then my dad mentions that my mom doesn’t want to stay at my sisters house—he thinks that mom already told my sister this. My sister has no clue of what he is talking about and at that second dad realizes he messed up and says he cant tell us why—because mom wouldn’t want him to. Then, of course, I really want to know. My sister swears she will never tell mom. So Dad tells us that when they were staying at her house after my sister’s gall bladder surgery and mom was sleeping on the couch and mom felt someone/something pick her up by her feet and drop her back on the couch. He said that mom was really freaked out by this—more scared than he has ever seen her before. Mom doesn’t want anyone to know about this because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is crazy—can’t say that I blame her either. I have no idea of what to do with that information.

So about 50 minutes into lunch, I'm ready to go back to work. Work was easy compared to lunch—the unfortunate thing is that I had a long day ahead of me. We go to leave and my sister says “I hope you don’t think I am crazy” and I say “not any more than usual”.

Dad calls me after getting into his car to debrief. He says “How does she survive? I cant believe I fathered that child! She is going to end up institutionalized”.

I get back to the office and my coworker asks how lunch was with my dad. I say “as fucked up as usual”.