So, I’m driving home from the market today, I’m looking at the Christmas lights that are already up (it’s December 2nd, for Pete’s sake!). And I start thinking about my lovely suburban neighbors, you know, the one’s with the two cheerleader daughters who are now both sorority sisters. The ones who the day after they had their WHOLE FAMILY over for Thanksgiving, obediently put up the Christmas lights, just as they have been doing for the past 10 years. Side note: I overheard Mrs. & Mr. Neighbor not laughing, joking, or yelling at each other, just conversing like a couple of guys who’s job it is to put up lights.
So I got to thinking about these folks, and some of my other lovely suburban neighbors, and how their homes compared to mine. They’ve got manicured lawns (manicured by gardeners), clean, new cars, got the lights up…it all looks so pretty from the outside.
My house, on the other hand, has my nephews 20 year old car parked out front, we’re baby sitting it while he’s “doing his time” in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps, the lawn gets manicured when I can get my lazy son to mow it, and mine is the last house on the block with it’s original paint job and garage door. Yeah, it’s kind of the shit house.
But there’s always music playing, somebody’s always singing, dancing, or mixing some new beats. My kids and I talk, laugh, and discuss the latest documentary that my son makes us watch, we have fun. And what you see is what you get.
And my lovely suburban neighbors, who go to mass every Sunday at the exact same time, and sit in the exact same seats, but don’t sing, and only shake hands with people they know, look so good and perfect. I stopped talking to them about 5 years ago when it was discovered that their daughter had been molesting my daughter, and instead of trying to find out who she learned that behavior from, decided that it was “just kids playing that got out of hand” and wanted to go on like it never happened. That combined with Mr. Neighbor constantly hitting on me when we were on speaking terms (I thought it was just the curse of being a divorcee in suburbia) caused me to see that perfect houses and manicured lawns are not the indicators of a happy family.
