one little bit. She sends a good chunk of her paycheck home to her two sisters and mother, volunteers for community music programs, and keeps her feet firmly on the ground. Never once have I found her floating too close to that stratosphere of self-importance that hovers over L.A. like smog. Lauren is real, she is true, and she is always the first person I confide in.
Although this time, the news really sucks.
This brings me back to my previously discussed dysfunctional family.
They handle good news really well. Bad news, not so much. There are a slew of reasons to avoid having heavy discussions with them. First, they are all tremendously busy people. Already pulled in a hundred different directions, they live under the earnest assumption that we can all take care of ourselves. There are no cracks in their system, so trying to squeeze my cancer into a hairline fracture is like trying to stop a nosebleed with a single sheet of discount toilet paper.
I am not the only one who thinks the family chain link is ridiculously strong. Enterprising reporters and paparazzi armed with telephoto lenses and unscrupulous sources have searched for the weak spots for years. There just aren’t any.
Sorry folks, it sucks for me, too.
Our closets simply don’t house any skeletons, hideous or otherwise. As hard as the media has tried, it has never been able to dig up anything that would jeopardize or shame my family during my mother’s campaigns. Countless reporters have taken a whack at it, and one of them got pretty darn close. It was during my senior year in high school, a flying soccer ball caught me right upside the head. Our team was playing “away” at the time, so how some photographer managed to find the obscure field and snap this one nasty shot is beyond me. But he did. He clicked away at the exact moment I whipped my body around, grabbed hold of the offending midfielder’s long ponytail and dropped her flat on her ass. Sure, it was a knee jerk reaction and I should have cooled down on the sidelines, but I popped her. In a way, she popped me right back.
The next day, I appeared on the front page of every rag across town. Teeth bared, muscles tensed, hand clearly seen wrapped around the long strands of brown hair. We almost laughed it off, but then the national media picked it up and played me off as Senator Mel Sheridan’s brutal beast of a daughter who obviously needed anger management intervention before someone else got hurt. My mother never addressed the picture directly, but her office did release a statement saying something to the effect of… “Our family respects the rules of all organized sports, and would expect the coaches to dole out the proper punishments for anyone caught breaking them.”
My mother was fiercely protective of her children, but she did make me well aware that the ponytail smack down was not acceptable behavior and she hoped I had learned a valuable life lesson that this type of crisis resolution did not work on the soccer field or in the real world.
Being Mel and Brett Sheridan’s daughter meant lots of little life lessons and discussions about better ways to handle those unexpected moments.
Inasmuch as I say we are a dysfunctional family, follow me here. Imagine what it feels like to live up to someone else’s expectations every stinking day of your life. Let me tell you, it can be daunting, frustrating, and just about impossible. It makes me weak, but I crawl back every time. Where else am I supposed to go?
Certainly, dysfunction is not always so subtle. It can come in the abusive taunts you hear hollered from the sidelines of a football game full of ten-year-olds. It can be the absentee mother, the only parent not to show up for the third grade Halloween party. It can be all of those obvious things, or it can be more refined and keen, cutting swaths of pain through your psyche deeper than a serrated edge can slither through skin.
I should know. It’s been happening to me my entire life.
I grew up denying my emotions, cutting off their air until they were insignificant enough to ignore. I may not be the same person I am today if I had been allowed to cry, or scream, or feel sorry for myself…just once. When you develop your personality based on other people’s expectations, you can’t help but wonder where you might have wound up.
Or with whom.
I have chased many a good man away with my inability to share, or indulge the give and take of a normal relationship. I have been told I’m far too independent, way too self-reliant, and much too eager to take on the role of the provider.
That’s pretty much more than enough to scare off almost anyone, and who could blame them anyway?
I’m a total drag. Now I have cancer.
Can I have a table for one? For the rest of my life.
Time has come for me to tell someone. Cancer is a tough thing to sit on for too long, and there is so much information to wade through I need a second set of eyes to understand it all. I’ve ruled out telling any of my family members first. I think that needs to wait until I can get them all in one room so I don’t have to keep repeating the shitty details of what’s to come.
Of course, getting the vice president to lock in on a place and time is a bit like walking through a corn maze with a blindfold wrapped around your head.
Whenever I need to speak to my mother, I usually start with my dad. At least he is easier to keep track of these days, and I don’t have to start with the chain of command to get him live on the phone. He keeps himself busy with several business ventures and a ton of charity work. My favorite is the non-profit he runs for inner city athletes who show real promise but are saddled with crack whores for mothers and fathers who beat them up.
He is always available to us, just a phone call away, albeit on a highly safeguarded phone. As the second-husband and all, he is constantly under the protection of Secret Service, but he insisted on maintaining a personal Blackberry for business purposes and for family necessity. It’s not your typical Blackberry, of course. This one has encoded GPS, and an emergency line that connects him immediately to the Situation Room at the White House. All incoming calls are cleared from a list of known or suspected terrorist extensions, and the line is untraceable.
That’s about as private as it’s going to get when your wife is the vice president.
All of us live with certain measures in place to ensure our safety. We also have secure cells, and our addresses are kept off the public information rolls. I get a monthly update from the national security investigators on any attempted breaches, as do my sister, brother and grandparents. This was a point of contention early on in the president’s administration. Apparently, it was a novel idea to share security information with civilians, but my mother insisted her family receive notification if they were in imminent danger. She also demanded each of her children receive a version of my father’s tricked out Blackberry, and even made a few attempts to extend Secret Service protection to us, even though technically we didn’t qualify for it because we were all adults. What Mama wants, Mama gets because eventually the White House relented on the phone, but not on the A-Team. Personally, I prefer the whole ignorance is bliss theory, but my mother is the antithesis of ignorance and bliss, so the phone goes everywhere I go. Same drill for my brother and sister. At least we don’t have the men in black trailing us around.
Kelby, most of all, will hate that I am about to become a talking point, she is quite used to claiming that all for herself thank you very much. She loves that she is the spitting image of my mother with striking yet classic features, a wide genuine smile, and a cascade of honey blonde hair. She is tall enough to cast a noticeable shadow when she enters a room, yet beguiling enough to make her your best friend. Instead of envying Kelby, you just want to bask in her light. Until she burns your skin off, that is. Kelby is by no means evil, but she is opportunistic, self-serving, and completely obsessed
