A taste of the lovin'

I have a family reunion coming in the next few weeks. It's been in the works for the last year, I've been planning to go to it forever and I'm now ... reluctant.

I've been away from Pennsylvania for almost three years, and I've been home once in that nearlythreeyears. My grandmother turned 80, we had a big to-do for her in a firehall in the town where my mom grew up. I went, it was without incident, everyone was awesome, but mostly it that "holy hell, we haven't seen you since you were this high" way that is pleasant, but sort of condescending. One of my mega-religious aunts -- the one who is married to my mom's youngest brother, who is actually younger than one of my brothers -- asked me how many kids I had.

She asked this with a big smile, and TOTALLY expected an answer with a number in it. Like, one or two or ten. I pointed and her and said, Oh You. And laughed. And went to get a drink at the keg with my uncles and the other miserable dudes, boyfriends of my cousins who'd been dragged to this thing.

My uncle Ken had had a heart attack not too long before this party for my grandma was planned. Despite the whole thing about how you probably shouldn't be putting down glass after glass of I.C. Light after a heart attack, he still was. The keg was getting the the almost tapped point, so he poured a beer for me.

I asked him how it was going. When I was little, Uncle Ken was pretty much a badass. He was a foreman at a steel mill, had a wicked hot younger wife, a huge house, drove a Caddy.

You don't smoke anymore, huh? Ken, when I was little, smoked a shitload of Camels. Nah, I quit ...

And he did this thing, which has alternately bothered me and soothed me since then. He chucked me on the shoulder, and he said this:

This thing, you know ... it's okay. Okay? You should come home more often.

And then he hugged me.

In my entire life, none of my 4000000 uncles has ever hugged me. And, you know, maybe only 1 or 2 aunts have hugged me. It's a big, stern Irish family, so you know, not a whole lot of hugging.

Holy fuck, the hugging. My uncle Bo hugged me. My aunt Cathy, despite being a giant cunt throughout my entire childhood, hugged me. Uncle Harry, newly remarried and suddenly affectionate: hugzilla. Uncle Bo hugged me again, just for kicks. My grandma got mysterious tears in her eyes ... and then hugged me LIKE EXTRA HARD FOR SOME REASON. My aunt Jane and uncle E.J., who're as close as I'm gonna get to hipsters in my family, hugged me so much that I thought I might lose my eyes from the pressure. My cousins -- all 42 of them -- all pretty much snagged me for a little hug lovin' throughout the day.

So here we go. It's been like two years since this, and still ... what the fuck, huh? I keep kind of going over it in my head & still dunno: hug bomb? Coordinated effort on the part of some folks who're ordinarily kind of hick-ish to be all, hey, that gay thing? A-Fucking-Okay. Have a hug, gaywad.

I keep thinking about this as the family reunion -- our first in almost 20 years! -- approaches. My niece has texted me pretty much daily in the last week about it. She's my favorite (sorry, other nieces and nephews, the first born and the one that shares my birthday? FAVE. I can't help it.) and kind of maybe idolizes me, and man, that's some pressure.

I ... you know, I don't know what I'm freaking out about. I want to go and eat pierogies and kielbasa and pigs-in-the-blanket and drink Iron City and spend time with my gram, who's kind of getting to the point where she's spending weeks at a time at my parents' place because of medical shit.

I WANT. I DON'T want to, at the age of 30, to have to fucking pretend that, no matter how okay you are with gay thing, to be all fucking stupid about it and not say anything about Punk Rock Femme. I DON'T want the hey, we're okay with the gay thing to extend to just my actual presence in the room; I want it to extend to talking about, seeing the person I love.

And I don't know if it would. GOD, maybe that's what all those hugs were about two years ago. MAYBE, hugs from aunt frigid bitch meant, hey, bring you same-sex sin partner to our next family reunion! I have no idea, because we're not big on communication, you know, AS A FAMILY.

That just brings me to the point of this post, the reason that I started typing in the first place. Punk Rock Femme's family? Her parents? AMAZING. Her step-parents? AMAZING. Her step-step-parents? AMAZING. Her grandparents? There really isn't a word to describe their all-consuming radness (I'd link to PRF's grandparents, but that seems way too personal. Grandparents. Web presence. Yeah, I know, huh?) Wow.

I'm sort of simultaneously in awe of how good I have it with the in-laws and how kind of fucked up my own family is about every gay, gay, gay thing ever.

After all of that ... should I stay or should I go?

You know, there's a web phrase for all of this:

TL;DR


If you did? Props.