Is there such a thing as normal anymore? Or is normalcy, like beauty – in the eye of the beholder? I often wonder about that.
It was easier to comprehend things when I was much younger (darn near a hundred years ago). It didn’t require a rocket scientist mentality or a Ph.D. in political correctness to determine what was normal and what wasn’t. Back then, we learned in school that two plus two equals four. Nowadays, even that is arguable. Ask a scientist or mathematician, and that person might tell you that two plus two doesn’t necessarily equal four. Then, they’ll go on to explain that significant figures and rounding could produce a different answer. For gosh sake, I am not delving any further into that. Anyone who wants additional information about the quandary of two plus two had best start doing their research.
The conversion from normalcy to the existing status quo sometimes annoys me. Things that once fit neatly into boxes now bulge and punch holes through the container. I like the way a friend of mine described the situation when we were discussing it recently. He said, “Society is on the downstroke. The best days are behind us.”
My favorite television show is The View. The women on the program are intelligent, courageous, and outspoken. They don’t give a flying squirrel whether the public agrees with what they say, nor do they hold back on voicing their opinion. Even when they have a co-host or guest on the show whose ideas I strongly disagree with, who I feel is teetering on the border of idiocy, I still respect that person’s right to voice their opinion.
Like The View’s co-hosts, I am not bothered by people’s judgment of my viewpoint. However, I am astute enough to know that there are times when it is prudent to be diplomatic instead of shooting from the hip. I feel sorry for people who are so afraid of expressing what they honestly think because they fear that being candid will make them look bad, biased, or bonkers in the eyes of their relatives or friends. So, they suppress their true feelings and deny what they are really thinking. Then, later they silently fume about what they wish they had said. Been there. Done that. Years ago. Ain’t doing it no mo’. (Okay, I got a bit carried away there. But isn’t that the freedom of journaling?)
Getting back to the topic. I miss the days when if I received an unexpected wedding invitation from an acquaintance who I didn’t know very well, I didn’t have to wonder if it would be a heterosexual or same-sex marriage. Of course, the gender of the partners will not determine whether or not I attend the wedding. I don’t care who weds who. But, the fact that I don’t care about the gender of the couple doesn’t stop me from wondering. With the growing trend of parents giving their children unisex names, guessing the gender of someone’s S.O. isn’t as easy as it used to be. For example, if a wedding invitation reads, “… joyfully invite you to the wedding of Blair and Blake” or “the honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of Casey and Hunter,” there may be cause for pause. Suppose I want to buy the couple a set of engraved coffee mugs or embroidered gift towels; in order not to commit a faux pas, I need to know whether to buy “His and Hers, His and His or Hers and Hers.”
And look at families. As I see it, there is no such thing anymore as a normal family. Okay, I suddenly sense that using the word normal will be like pouring rubbing alcohol on a bleeding, open wound in some folks. So let’s strike it. Perhaps, in this instance, traditional is a more acceptable word to use. Traditional families like I used to see on TV programs during my generation’s younger days. Families like Father Knows Best, The Partridge Family, Good Times, and even The Jeffersons are what I mean by traditional families. They used to be referred to as nuclear families. I wonder, is the term “nuclear family” taboo now, too?
Traditional or contemporary families are more on par with This is Us and Modern Family.
When I was a child, I had friends who may have had one or two step-siblings living in their home. Aside from the step-siblings, the children in the house all had the same last name. (Sometimes the step-kids did, too.) According to a study by Cassandra Dorius, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, “One in five of all American moms have kids who have different birth fathers.” So, there could be as many as five or more children in today’s household, each carrying a different surname connected with their numerous baby daddies. I suspect that this is now considered normal; oops, I mean traditional.
Well, those are some of my thoughts about normalcy.
Dare I publish this? People might consider me unreasonable, narrow-minded, or biased; whatever adjective suits their fancy doesn’t faze me. But in judging me, I hope that they will acknowledge that I am sincere in expressing my beliefs and opinions. I refuse to cowardly straddle the line and pretend to be impartial when I have concrete feelings about something.
I’m sure that even my critics would agree that Charles Addams was on point when he wrote, “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” With that – I do agree.