ABOUT THE TIME WHEN I WAS MADE A HILTON HEIRESS

...Yeah, well, it was a dream I had. I sent it in to my buddy at SLOW WAVE, but I don't know that he is going to be able to break it down into four panels.

In the dream I went on a picnic with the Mom and two sisters and their entourage of servants and assistants (the rich are rarely alone). For some reason the Mom insisted very Martha Stewart-like that we all sit on the red and white checkered table cloth, to make it more like a real picnic. The only problem was, it was a paper tablecover, not a cloth one. That was just the first of many things that would make me feel sorry for my new friends.

After the picnic we were walking through a park I used to go to when I was a little kid. I was trying to look around and see what had changed, but Paris really needed all of my attention for herself. She was very enamoured with me and took my arm in a companionable manner. Eventually she decided to make me a Hilton. Everyone else, even the mom and the sister agreed.

I loved this, because suddenly I was very, very blonde, leggy, and thin. Plus they let me keep most of my boobs (I had way too much to be proportionate, so some had to go, but the mom decided I was to be the buxom Hilton.) And I was rich, of course. But it turns out that the Hilton's had a "hidden sister" and she was given all the unfortunate attributes of mine-- and everyone else in the family's as well. I felt sorry for her, but not sorry enough to ask for all my fat and poverty back.

The fat sister was dressed in crappy grey sweat shirt and baggy pants. Her hair was brown and scraggly. At one point we walked through a public restroom in the park, and someone had left the diaper changer down. The fat sister thought it would be funny to trip and fall over the protruding diaper table and make it crash. Because the Hilton's have so much money they can control time if it's comedic timing. Rather, if it is something they think is going to be funny.

So the fat sister fell very slowly, then there was a pause as she crashed on top of the table, and another pause before the table crashed slowly to the ground. Everyone but me laughed and applauded. I felt horribly embarrassed for the lot of them. Obviously so much wealth had destroyed their sense of humour completely.

So that was my dream. Sigmund, Carl, go ahead and have at it. Is it "zee muzzer and my peniz envy?" or has the "collective celebrity unconscious" seized my weak mind?

I really had no idea what this dream meant until a few days ago. (I think I had this about two weeks ago, so it is still pretty recent, and it was very vivid, so I remembered it clearly.) I thought maybe I wanted more money or to be more blonde and thin (well, I do, but you know what I mean). But I realised yesterday that this is actually about my own family, and all families, and the roles we play within our tribal units.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, wealthy. (At least not in terms of cash, equity or assets.) But I have known a lot of rich kids, and children of celebrities and politicians. For reasons I still don't fully understand, alot of people that I meet who weren't born wealthy think that I was, at least at first meeting. Eventually, if nothing else, my teeth give me away. I have several crooked teeth. They aren't immediately obvious, but they are noticable.

Rich people like me because I treat everyone the same and act pretty much the same regardless of where I am or who is around. (I have come to the conclusion that I am somewhat emotionally autistic. I do not respond the way most people do, and many of my "appropriate responses" are not organic, but memorized. And I am not talking here about the normal and cultural responses that all people must go through. But this is a whole other blog.) This social autism leads to a lot of stuff coming out of my mouth that shouldn't, but that only bothers people who aren't dripping with cash or power. And rebel children of politicians and celebrities embrace my awkward and too revealing moments because they were never allowed to have any of their own.

In fact, the daughter of a famous fifties movie star told me that all celebrity children go through a rebel "grunge" stage. Not grooming or brushing their teeth. Refusing to wear decent clothes or keep themselves or their belongings in good working order. Because they always have to look good for the camera and the fans and so forth. She said there are some who get stuck in it. I know a few of these children, too. They are my dream's fat sister. They have absorbed all of the negative traits of their families.

But not just rich people have the fat sister. I see this in a lot of families. Particularly where one or more parent is in denial about their own shortcomings. How many families have the super groomed mother and the grungy daughter? The overly macho, sports father and the couch potato, mama's boy son? The ineffective, alcholic parent and the care-taking child?

In many ways the fat Hilton sister is more integral to the family than Paris or Nicki. In many ways she loves and cares for the family system more than the functioning and acceptable siblings. Because she wants to heal her family. She wants to balance out what is missing, and conversely, to make sure that the love she recieves is genuine. She refuses to be loved simply for her behaviour, her weight, her grooming, or social acceptablity.

Children always want to heal their parents. The greater the dysfunction, the greater the child's desire, and the more the child will feel responsible. Children are completely self-centered. They believe that everything that happens-- including daddy's drinking or mommy's disease-- is because of something they did. The more that the parents are able to care for the child and teach the child what is an appropriate level of responsibility to accept, the more that the child will be able to heal-- even if the dysfunction in the family remains. (And assuming the dysfunction is something like cancer, and not incest.)

Obviously the more balanced the parents are, the more aware they are of their children's individual personalities and problems, and the more that they are able to set aside , or subdue, their own needs to respond to each child, the better the family will function as a whole and the healthier the children will be. However, an alcholic will not likely come home drunk and explain that they are the weak ones and it's not the child's fault and so forth. The binging/purging bulemic mother is not likely to explain to her anorexic daughter she has her own body images to deal with and it's not her daughter's fault.

In some ways the children of the rich have a harder time resolving their own dysfunction because the quest for money and the acquistion of things is not available as an outlet for their frustration. I see greed as a direct result of some lacking in childhood. Greed is not healthy and a healthy person doesn't hoard.

And the children of the famous have it doubly hard. How does one achieve fame when one was born to it? How is one to distinguish themselves when they were born to such distinguished parents? Perhaps by slipping into totally obscurity and doing nothing with thier lives at all, as one friend of mine has done. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, sent to the finest schools, but makes less than I do and he rarely works steadily. He lives in a dump and drives casts off cars from his parent's estate. (He would not appreciate me pointing this out, and I must admit I write so freely only because I know he isn't reading this.)

On a lesser scale, many of these things did occur in my family even though we weren't wealthy or famous. But my grandmother was a hard act to follow. And my grandfather's chromosome's gave my mother and her siblings their disease. (They have the same illness patterns, but because they are functioning and have never been diagnosed, they are not seen as mentally ill. If you are inside my family system, though, it is obvious.) My grandmother's children waver greatly between an inablility to cope with day to day life, hoarding and "pack-rat"-ing and slovenliness, to overly rigid belief systems and obsessions with cleanliness, money (not things-- money), and thinness.

(My sister and I are, in many ways, my grandmother's second family. She raised us, and I see many of those patterns in both of us, but not as obviously as it occurs in her first children. Also, I have had serious enough problems with depression that I have been tested and diagnosed, and I don't have my mother's physical, chemical imbalance. I believe my sister has also looked into this, but I don't know.)

If my family is represented by my Hilton dream, than I truly am both Paris and the fat sister. (My family is my mother, me and my sister. My grandmother was the other parent, but she has been dead now for ten years.) In different situations and at different times I have been one or the other. I think that this dream was partly my choosing to be more Paris than the overlooked sister in the baggy sweat pants. But I think that I needed to see that all along I had been serving an important function: absorbing the negative or unwanted or unbalanced traits of my family. One thing that really struck me about the dream was how included she was, and when she tried to do something, everyone stopped and applauded her. Even though it was ridiculous, ill-timed, and pathetic.

Having seen this dream clearly though, and especially having seen this because of someone else's family story (a friend was talking about her family's version of the fat sister), I realise that I am now ready to be something wholly new. Not Paris, or Nicki, or the mother, or the fat sister. I don't even want to be in the entourage. I want to be someone I don't know that I've ever had the courage to be before: myself.

Wish me luck. I am kind of a clutz, and I foresee a few stumbles over diaper tables.

UNTIL NEXT TIME, TOODLE ON!