Attempting Normal by Marc Maron

I will never know the most of it. I’m not sure they even do anymore. Things get lost as time dims the lights.
    I’m curious and even inquisitive, but there’s some stuff I really don’t want to know about them. Parents seem to believe that there’s an emotional statute of limitations on their secrets, but I think that’s wrong: There’s some stuff they should never tell you. But after a divorce, or years of bad blood, or a supersaturation of shame, or just old age, parents think the statute is up and they will dump some toxic garbage on your psyche’s front lawn. For instance, I now know my father was a philandering madman. I’ve got details I can’t even disclose here that involve guns and pissed-off husbands.
    Then there was this conversation on the phone with my mother.
    Mom: I just wanted to tell you I am going into the hospital overnight. Everything is fine. I just wanted you to know.
    Me: What do you mean? What’s wrong?
    Mom: Nothing. Don’t worry.
    Me: Just tell me what’s up. I can handle it.
    Mom: I’m getting my boobs redone.
    Me: Redone? What? When did you have them done originally?
    Mom: Nineteen seventy-six. Right before your bar mitzvah.
    Me: Really, you had like the original fake boobs.
    Mom: Yes, the doctor said they needed to come out. They’re calcifying.
    Me: Okay, that’s enough info. Well, let me know everything is okay.
    I felt like my entire life was a lie. All those years I just thought my mom had great tits.
    There are things I don’t want to know about my parents, but I like knowing things about myself. This sometimes means tracking my behavior back to root causes, to my emotional legacy, which runs through my parents. Because of my mother’s eating disorder I asked her if she had ever been sexually abused. She has become much more self-aware and quite pleasant and proactive about it. When I asked her, she said, “Ya know, Marc, I keep trying to remember something like that but I don’t think so.”
    She blames her mean fat grandmother for it because she made my mother eat. I can handle that.
    My father is a mystery to me, outside of knowing that he was the center of his family’s attention and that he had a depressed mother, and perhaps a biological propensity toward depression. I never really had a sense of what his relationship with his father was. By the time I met my grandfather, Ben, he was a very passive man. My grandmother and the woman he married after mygrandmother died were both incredibly overbearing in one form or another, from what I could tell. As I got older my father told me that he lost his virginity when his father got him a prostitute. I also picked up here and there that my grandfather was a bit of a lady’s man and that caused some problems. That is really all I know. No real stories behind them, just information that I could enter into my emotional abacus. I’m always moving the beads around trying to figure out who I am.
    With that said, I have never been able to explain to myself or anyone else what happened at my grandfather’s funeral. It is an event that has become the epitome of the dark poetry that defines my relationship with my dad and his with his father. He dismisses it. I can’t forget it. It defies meaning but craves it.
    My grandpa Ben died from a stroke in 1992. I was on the east coast so I met my father at the funeral in New Jersey. I got to the funeral home to find that my father was manic, a normally strange disposition for a funeral, especially your own father’s, but par for the course for my dad. He was making the rounds, telling jokes, laughing, checking in with people’s lives. There was not a shred of grief in his behavior. To him it seemed like a fine time to be the center of attention. He was competing with the corpse and memory of his father. People act weird at funerals sometimes. Maybe he was consumed with sadness and this was a reaction to that. I don’t think so. After he had been strutting around spinning yarns for a