To Mask or Unmask
We are all created with multiple personalities, or at least multiple personas. We would all like to think we are the same person with everyone, but that is simply rarely the case. We are all made up of layers. I know that when my mother was alive, when I was with her, especially at her condo in Las Vegas, I was a respectful and dutiful son. I cared about what she cared about and wanted very much to please her, especially in her later years. I have two sisters and when I am with them, I go into brother mode. This isn’t just any old brother, but a brother who knows that he has been the man of the family since I was four. I don’t think I felt that obligation so much while we were growing up, but once we were grown I felt I had to do things for my sisters that a present father would otherwise do. When my older sister, Kathy, turned forty, I bought her what she always wanted our father to buy her, a red sports car. I got her a red Saab convertible. When my other sister, Barbara, turned forty eighteen months later, I asked her what she wanted (her desires were less obvious to me than Kathy’s dream of that sports car). Barbara had become very practical as a grown woman and mother, much more so than the impractical young woman of her youth. When she turned forty she asked me for the money to renovate her kitchen, a very practical request which a father might have granted, but which a brother felt very obligated to and was happy to provide.
There are very few among us who can claim that they are the same person in all settings and with all groups. In many ways, my primary persona is that of a father. It is the one role I want to believe and try to hold as the most important role I fill. There’s that psychoanalytic test where we are supposed to say with no prompts “I am ________” and then fill in the blank repeatedly and sequentially. I hope that if I’m ever administered that test I will be present enough to say, “I am a father” first and foremost. I believe Kim will allow me that one priority because she knows that the very next thing out of my mouth would be, “I am a husband.”Besides a father, a husband, a son and a brother, I am also an uncle and cousin and general family member. We all taut that the most important thing in life is family, but I am wary of suggesting that we always follow that credo the way we should.
First of all, family is a very broad category. Besides my children, wife, parents and siblings, the rest of my extended family really operates in layers as I will assume it does for anyone. For instance, I have a first cousin, once removed who, along with his wife, we feel particularly close to. He has a brother and a sister who we only know in passing and his mother, who is my first cousin, I send a Christmas card to, but is otherwise largely absent from my life and my consciousness. I also have half-siblings. I have two half-sisters who I have become especially friendly with over the years, and have even acted as counsel to their children at times. I guess I have to call these my half-nephews and half-nieces. And what about the children of my siblings and their spouses and children and those children of Kim’s siblings and their spouses and children. Like all modern families, if we drew out the fullness of our family tree it would reveal a very complicated array of relationships, all of which enjoy a different circle of closeness based on any number of things. Some are close because we spend a lot of time with them and they are like-minded. Some are not so close because they have moved away and have become very much of different mindset.
I recently wrote about Kim’s sister’s husband’s siblings and nieces who came to visit for a family event. I barely know these folks and have probably only been with them a handful of times, but after a weekend together, I feel quite kindly towards them and would put them in a more inner circle than many other family that might be closer in on the family tree. In particular, I have three cousins from my mother’s brother, who moved off to places like Arkansas and became very different people than me or those with whom I am closest. We also have some difficult history with them based on money borrowed and never repaid and hard feelings that linger from this act or that omission. They look on paper to be near the center of “Family” and yet they are so far outside my circle of trust that they might not really qualify as family if I were completely honest about the situation. They say you can pick your friends but not your family and I have now concluded that both legs of that supposition are false. You sometimes are stuck with old friends even when you are not so friendly with them anymore. And as for family, I think I have proven to myself that I have moved some family members into a category that makes them far less familial.
So, this is where masks come into play. We certainly have different personas for the different areas of our life. The most common divide is between work and home. But as I have tried to explain, even within the home category, which generally implies family, the layering and closeness or distance probably make for the use of different personas with different family members. Having different personas is sometimes a subconscious distinction. But sometimes there is a very purposeful mask that we choose to wear in dealing with different people. My guess is that we have an easier time understanding this in a work context where you put on your client service face rather than your hard-as-nails businessperson face. I am reminded of a family member who has a high-contact service job and during the Pandemic has had to remain masked while her clients have often railed at her about this or that, often the very requirement that they be masked. Her response was to wear her mask to cover her feelings and wrote the words “Fuck You!” on the inside of her mask for all the sentiments that she wished she could express but which her job did not allow her to express. That may be the ultimate masking example that not only hides one’s true feelings, but still expresses quietly one’s innermost feelings.
There comes a time in all families when one must decide whether as Shakespeare said it best in Hamlet, Act III, Scene I: “To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”. Do we continue to wear our masks to hide our true feelings about the “outrageous” actions of some family member for the sake of avoiding the “sea of troubles” threat which invariably comes from unmasking? It is an issue we all face perhaps even every day in our lives. There is no easy answer here and it is always left to one’s better judgement of the moment. So, to paraphrase Hamlet, “To mask or unmask, THAT is the question.”