Why I Hate the Superbowl
Today, I realize this hatred is real, deep and intergenerational.
My mother also hated the super bowl because it was a time of my dad's most obvious barely passive AGGRESSIVE acting out.
I hate the super bowl, because it bracketed my birthday as the other side of a two sided disappointment equation. A January 17th birthday was close enough to December 25th that someone always combined my Christmas and my birthday present. Usually this happened with more than one person in my family. Through most of my childhood, the super bowl roared in, one to two weeks later monopolizing my father's attention and creating The Third War of the Worlds we religiously unacted every holiday season.
Every year our holidays were infected with a battle between meals (good food usually having taken hours of preparation by me and my mother in a very gender division of labor) and television football (always the game in competition with whatever time my mother had set for the formal, sit down dinner.
First War: always on Thanksgiving.
Second War: again on Christmas Day.
And then Super Bowl Sunday.
This is a very old story and gets fuzzy around the edges. I haven't had the major players for my drama alive and present for over 30 years. I remember there was a year when we went to my paternal grandfather's home. I was excited to see how other people handled this chronic meal vs. T.V. problem that my mother and dad could not seem able to resolve.
The answer was a very disappointing rush to a buffet table to grab a plate and take it back to the living room to sit in front of a TV tray zombie like and continue watching the ball game(s).
And yet it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Through my married life, I traded Super bowl Sunday frenzy for March madness having married a white guy in love with the Kentucky wildcats. Same level of crazy behaviors. Same relatively gendered division of interest and labor around the actual event.
That's a very personal explanation of my stomach flip that still comes at the mention of this big event. All the rational, "aligned with my personal politics" reasons: witness to the gambling, the sex trafficking, the alcohol flowing freely, the wives being beaten, by the drunk husbands that lost all those bets are secondary.
That little girl who wanted big birthdays without family trauma drama is getting re-parented.
Now two more games have been added to the NFL season. The Great day of sanctified violence, gambling, sex trafficking and obscene commercialism is creeping up on Valentine's Day.
Which has been "reclaimed" as the day for a good quarter of a century now: (https://www.vermontartscouncil.org/series/the-vagina-monologues/)
What a cognitively dissonant mess is my country of origin, and its relationship to legal addictions!