The following is an excerpt from a longer essay about my relationship with the generations of women in my family who precede me, as told through the story of the night my aunts discovered frozen alcoholic beverages. Generation F inspired me to consider my own relationships with past generations of women as I also witness the future generation of women through Girls Write Now.
I come from a family of mothers. There is a fierce, packlike protectiveness that binds us all together, no matter that we consist of many nuclear families, each with their own matriarch, sets of rules and expectations. As a toddler, I was grabbed out of the sun and slathered with sunscreen by each of my aunts as if I was their own child. I’ve been fed squishy PB&J sandwiches on pillowy white bread that were made by the dozen and handed out to our grubby herd without any designation as to whose kid was whose. Those delineations mattered less here. Now, as an adult, I can feel the love with which my aunts dutifully fed us and protected us during our childhood years translated into genuine interest in our adult-sized lives.
As the night continues on, the blender drinks get stronger and stronger. You see, my family drinks in spite of its alcoholism. In the ’70s, in the span of one year, my grandmother and her sister both divorced their first husbands, who turned out to be violent, dangerous alcoholics. Their ex-husbands’ tumultuous relationship with alcohol is how they both found themselves single mothers, my grandmother raising three daughters and my great-aunt five daughters and one son. So they moved in together, their two nuclear families splitting open and sewing themselves back together into one big family, with two sisters as the heads of the house. They even shared the master bedroom. Their tiny, overstuffed home was far from ruled with an iron fist, and as my mother puts it, “They had lost control of us by the time we were fifteen.” They have stories of skipping prom, crashing cars before they had their licenses, and plenty of underage drinking. They were sisters and cousins, each other’s best friends and partners in crime. And if it sounds like a weird cult mixed with Full House, that’s because it was.
Every booze-fueled night of hijinks is a way for us to challenge our family’s history of addiction and say, “You haven’t made us victims yet!” But it’s also temptation of fate. It is somewhere in the murky hours well beyond the third or fourth round of daiquiris that my aunts decide that the time has come for all of us women to burn our bras. Now, before you begin to paint a picture in your head of the women in my family as renegade women’s-rights activists, the kind who quote Gloria Steinem or have opinions on Lena Dunham, let me continue. Because the burning of the bras is not limited to the women at the fire. Oh no, the men are told to burn their underwear, too. And while this perhaps undoes any possible feminist symbolism you could have read into this, it does feel a bit more inclusive, doesn’t it?