Have you ever had a friend or partner who has a really strange habit or behavior and you’ve thought to yourself, “I bet they are the only person on the planet who does this.” And then you meet their family? I remember being in line for snacks at a movie theater and my then boyfriend (now husband) ordered a bottle of water. I couldn’t believe it! In the Raskin family, you never pay for water at the movies. Why would you when you can just ask for free water. Sure, sometimes it comes in a very tiny plastic cup and you have to get a bunch of them, but it is still worth the steal of saving $6. But when I explained this extremely obvious logic out loud, I wasn’t met with great appreciation for showing him the light. I was met with a strange look. Because in the grand scheme of things, paying extra for a water bottle to wash down your $9 popcorn really isn’t that big of a deal. It’s just one part of being price-gouged for daring to leave your house.
Part of growing up and interacting with people outside of your immediate family is realizing that not everyone does things the same way. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that some people prefer home-cooked meals to take-out or a restaurant because their reference point for home-cooked meals isn’t steamed vegetables and a mother who hates to cook. In our household, home-cooked meals caused a collective groan and I still carry a bit of that bias to this day. Despite now being married to a man who is gifted in the kitchen and takes food presentation extremely seriously. For John, home-cooked meals are a display of love—not an unavoidable burden like in my house.
I always understood that people came from different backgrounds and our backgrounds influence how we interact in the world. But nothing put this phenomenon in a clearer light then when one of my professors, Dr. Louis Cozolino, put it so simply I felt like I had been hit in the face: families are a cult. I know the term cult is pretty charged and incendiary, but he didn’t mean it in a nefarious sense but more as a metaphor. There is no one power-hungry cult leader who is trying to pass their family off as a religion to receive tax breaks. (At least not in most families.) But there are a series of rules, beliefs and customs that make up how a family operates. We are taught that this is how the world works and this is how we should work within that system. Except…it’s not true. How can there be only one right way when each family believes something different?