“The Perfect Family Life”
Eric Patterson
My mother directed our home movies growing up. Too much was at stake to leave the actors to improvise. “Okay, Daddy, you hold up the fish. Eric, you pretend you’re disgusted while your brother wants to eat it. Now everybody, look like you’re having fun!” We felt great pressure to perform because we got only a single take to get it right. Super-8 mm film stock was so expensive.
The perfect, light-hearted camaraderie depicted onscreen offered our family the chance to deny the imperfection inside the home: a wife and two sons on edge from a father arriving home with a head start on drinking; a mother demanding emotional intimacy from her children at any cost because she was not receiving it from her husband.
A Navajo weaver will purposefully add an imperfection to an otherwise perfect textile into which they have placed their thoughts and spirit. This small line of different-colored yarn is called the ch’ihónit’i, or “the way out.” It provides a pathway for the weaver to exit the textile before it is circulated within the wide market.
This pathway, or spiritline, shows that the weaver, being human, is imperfect. It demonstrates humility. The spirit line also helps protect the weaver’s sanity; otherwise, they might become lost within the textile of which they have become part.
Part of my recovery has been to acknowledge the spiritline in my family life without losing sight of the entire blanket. My alcoholic father and narcissistic mother brought pain and confusion to my past. Yet it helps to also hold that which was uncomplicated and heartfelt in my upbringing.
Many times our family would laugh as we got into punning contests with my father at the dinner table. During the football commercials on Sunday fall afternoons, my father would throw the pigskin around with my brother and me on the street in front of our house. My mother, a musician who opened for Nat King Cole at the Copacabana, gave my brother and me the gift of teaching us piano for ten years.
My parents were human. It isn’t fair to expect perfection as perhaps a child might. As I reflect upon that, I learn to accept and forgive. I am human. As I admit my mistakes and the imperfect, human ways in which I have acted, I become kinder to myself.
On a recent phone call my 94 year old mother revealed that she had thrown away all of the home movies. (She “needed the space,” she said.) She acted without consulting my brother or me. We had not had the films transferred to video.
It hurts to imagine that these images of our past are gone forever. Yet perhaps the perfect home movies weren’t all that important after all. The details of our family life – the full spectrum of our experience – remain in memory and now in typeface. That which is imperfect lives on in spirit.
“Note: The ch’ihónit’i is described in Jill Ahlberg Yohe’s article, “Situated Flow: A Few Thoughts on Reweaving Meaning in the Navajo Spirit Pathway.” Yohe, whose dissertation examined the social role of weaving in contemporary Navajo life, learned the Navajo language and lived on the Navajo reservation for four and a half years.”
Copyright 2025 Eric Patterson. All rights reserved.
INMI Board Member Eric Patterson is a mental health advocate and oral storyteller.