Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 49: Joe

Prompt: "A song about a tree"

Selected by Joe

"Family Tree"

TV on the Radio

Dear Science, 2008

One time, in the same class that I made the PowerPoint presentation about penis cancer for, the professor started teaching us about genograms, and she ended up going fucking bugnuts and killing 65 minutes of class drawing her entire family tree on the board, and talking us through every minute family drama that had occurred in her life that she could remember to the best of her ability. It should probably go without saying that, when she began at the center, with her own location, and drew a thick line to her husband, that she then explained how she met her husband when they both performed in a college production of Godspell—hers was the work of a true theater geek with a lust for self-deprecating and unnecessary performance.

One semester later, I'm learning about genograms again (MSW professors fucking love genograms), and we manage to convince the professor to ditch a turgid process recording assignment in favor of everyone in the class making their own genograms, and writing a short paper about them. As someone who loves to talk about themselves and be a gossipy little bitch about the people who are closest to me (again: theater nerd), I attacked the assignment with aplomb. Made that genogram look like a fucking Pollock with all those jagged lines and crowded shapes.

I may have overshot the point where I should have explained that a genogram is basically like a family tree, except the lines don't just trace the generations, but also jut all over the place, connecting anyone on the tree who has an emotional connection, either positive or negative. It's a tool for therapy. Your cousin and your aunt hate each other? That gets a zig-zagged red line. Your uncle cut off contact with your dad? That get a thick black line that's got a big gaping hole in the middle. And so on. I know this isn't the type of "tree" *wink wink nudge nudge* that we're supposed to be alluding to through today's prompt, but just let me go with it.

I can't post the picture of my family's genogram on the blog. Even though I used first names only, it's still waaaaaay too personal to include in public. Plus, I played it fast and loose, since I wasn't about to ask my parents for more details about family drama that already makes them sad, and I was 100% sure that the professor wasn't going to be, like, fact-checking this shit. What was she gonna do, hold a séance on my grandpop's grave or something? So I have no idea how accurate the information is anyway. Who cares? You really think my abilities as a social worker are dependent in any fucking way on some crackshit paper I put together at four in the morning, in between bottle feedings for the newborn baby?

But here are some of the highlights, in one beefy-ass paragraph, while being as vague as I possibly can be, almost to the point of gibberish... At least one divorce on one side of my extended family, which means that there are tense and/or severed relationships jutting out from that in multiple directions—between the couple themselves, between one party and the ex-FIL who is a trad-Cath anti-divorce kinda dude, between that one party and the ex-sibling-in-law, who had warned their sibling originally not to get married, etc. For shits and giggles, I might now include the ex's newer children who were born to a different parent and thus not related to me but at least one of whom is now friends with my own kid through total coincidental preschool classroom placements. Another wing of the same side of the family finds another divorce, though in this case, the other party has more or less disappeared after also having another child with a different party, but in a very cool social-work-y twist, my family member has tasked himself with raising this child who isn't even biologically his, and they have bonded. Red lines between negative relationships and blue lines between positive relationships, you see. Higher up on that tree, technically higher but a kind of half-step generationally speaking, is a relative who passed away, and whose widow has, out of some misplaced grief, cut themselves off from members of the family. That's a tricky one because there's no one who is wrong in those types of situations. But I'm not really involved so what the fuck do I know, that's just me running my mouth about shit that don't concern me. Some drama all the way across the aisle on the other side of the family, with a large arm of the family being really messy emotionally and building up the numbers but not really providing the humans behind those numbers anything resembling a foundational support... and this ripples off into actual violence on the streets of upper Kensington and secret (grand)children and even secreter phone bills being paid on the sly, much to the chagrin of other members of the family who had been somewhat financially supporting the payer of those phone bills, so you can imagine the tension created when the payee removes themselves from the family but some of those family members find out their money is being funneled toward that payee anyway, this despite the fact that he was caught throwing a rock through a church window, and claims he didn't do it, and I'm not gonna say the police aren't liars because they very much are most of the time, but c'mon, we all know this dude, and if I had to make a bet on it, I'd put my money on this probably not being a Chris Chambers-type situation. Plus, there's some alleged domestic violence on that side that is never spoken about by anyone who would've been involved and only speculated upon by those who could have heard about it from others, and most of those parties are dead now and so it's all historical and far enough removed that it's just a matter of pondering, and not a current threat or danger or anything. Pondering how those types of patterns, and traumas, ripple through the generations, not in literal ways but in distant emotional ways, how maybe subsequent relationships are viewed differently, weaker or stronger or something like that, than they would be had that violence not occurred all those years ago. Lots of jagged red arrows point toward boxes marked with questions marks up there in the corner, sexual assaults that very much matter in the grand scope of multiple lives, despite the fact that the specific demographics have never reached my ears or eyes. Also: I have a once-removed cousin and an uncle on opposing sides of my family who are both Dallas Cowboys fans, so there's that.

The book we read for book club recently featured a priest character who was seeing a therapist, and this priest, in his youth, had been in Europe during the WWII bombings, and had seen his mother killed under the rubble of his home, her life leaving her body and he held her hand under the crushing brick and stone... the quasi-joke being that the priest concluded to the therapist that his childhood had been fine and pleasant and relatively drama-free, and the therapist looked at him like, what the fuck are you even talking about, dude, you just told me about the death and destruction, and you don't even realize. I like the idea of genograms because it provides a good opportunity to exam how you yourself fit into the wild drama that is your typical American family. This isn't to say that by doing my genogram I found that I was intimately involved in any trauma that I hadn't realized earlier. I guess I'm just saying that this kinda stuff might occasionally be tough to see when you're right in the middle of it, and it's worth the effort to take a bird's-eye view of things every once in a while. I also like genograms because this subject—the idea that we are all connected in the really complex and complicated ways—has always come pretty naturally to me, and when I'm thinking about genograms, I think that maybe becoming a social worker was my true calling after all (and not, say, blogging, perhaps).