"Growing up, my mother always told me the one thing she wanted more than anything else as a young woman was /a happy family/. She would often say this with an air of disappointment, which both unsettled and confused me. She had a family. I was her family. My brother and father were her family.
Were we not a happy family?
I didn't understand that not all families had fathers who threw vicious temper tantrums over nothing -- a dropped dish of popcorn, a lawn mower blade hitting a stone, the cancellation of a television program -- spitting and screaming and putting holes in the walls. I didn't understand that not all families had mothers who wept but said nothing when these things happened, who came to you afterward and asked /why do you always antagonize him, why can't you just behave, can't you just be good?/
I didn't understand that not all families had secret, bad things they knew about but would not talk about, secret, bad things they did to each other and the people around them, confident the rest of the family would turn a blind eye, even absolve them of the bad things they did.
We were /not/ a happy family, although that was not quite what my mother had meant.
The 'happy family' of which my mother spoke with such unfulfilled longing was actually something much larger, both more solid and more ideological -- not a happy family, but a Happy Family.
A Happy Family is not simply a contented family unit, but a social institution and, more importantly, an object of capitalist desire. Like the latest iPhone, a Gucci purse, or a Mercedes-Benz, the idea of the Happy Family has more value (and signals more about the owner) than the actual function of the object itself. It's a consumer good and, like all modern consumer goods, from headphones to sexual partners, from IKEA furniture to housing, from Nike sneakers to mental health care, it can be bought.
If you are willing to pay the right price. To make the right sacrifices. To stand in the right lines and sign the right papers. To turn your head and look away at the right times.
If you are willing, as it were, to play the game."
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