freewrite

Everyone in my family is as loud as can be, within my immediate family was well as extended family. It's almost a means of survival. The people in my family are uninhibited and unembarassed when it comes to noise and volume. You would never be heard in my family if you were quiet because qucikly you come to understand that you must talk over people, as rude as it seems, in order to simply be heard. My dad comes from a family of 8 children, all of whom are now grown and loud and have loud children, some of the children (my cousins) being borderline obnoxious. If you get angry in my family, we hardly ever deal with it rationally, we just yell at eachother pretty much. Whoever yells the loudest wins the arguement, as twisted and incorrect as that may seem. It's just our means of existence. In my family, you learn at a very young age that if you do not speak loudly, you won't be heard. And for a child's vloice to be heard, you basically have to shout. This is partly due to the fact that everyone has something to say and truly believes what they have to say is more important than what the next person has to say. They never would admit that, but that's essentially what it comes down to. I can remember feeling embarassed, and sometimes still do, about my family's loudness. I remember people staring at us, or atleast thinking they were. I can remember friends of mine when i was young telling me how loud my family was. You're not embarassed until you are old enough to recegnize that not every family is like yours. In my case, NOBODY I had met was remotely like my family. Thus started my lifelong (so far) embarassment of my family. My dad has this habit of singing very loudly in public. To this day I HATE when he does that. It really irritates the hell out of me. People stare, and I am so embarrassed. And when I ask him to stop, I am always greeted with a wonderfully shameful, "this is who I am, stop trying to make me something I'm not. I'm sorry your father is soo embarassing that you're ashamed of him!" Sense the sarcasm?? And then there are other times when I am proud to be in a large, loud family. This is usually when I am with all of my dad's brothers and sisters and their families. There are strength in numbers. When you're part of a large loud group of people, it's not half as embarassing as being with my immediate family of 4. I actually love being in public with all of them. I love laughing loud with them, hearing them tell stories, the whole bit.

I can also remember being very young and going to some of my first spend the night's at my friend's house. Their family was quiet, polite, and hardly ever told jokes. This was somewhat confusing. At this point in my life, all I knew was loud, obnoxious, and funny. It made me wonder if my family was normal, or if they were normal, as any small child would. I wasn't old enough yet to grasp the concept that no families are normal. But now I believe my family is one of the least normal. I can remember going over to certain individual's houses repeatedly and thinking, "this is a nice escape! It is peaceful, quiet, you don't have to yell to be heard, I kind of like it here!" There were other times that going to these type of households made me so uncomfortable that I wanted to leave and go back to the circus aka the Mulvihill house. I can remember thinking, "do these people have fun?"

Where did this come from? I asked myself. It didn't take me long to pick up on the fact that my dad was loud because being from a loud family of 10 people in one house, he had no other choice if he had any hope of being heard. My mom is one of the loudest in her family, immediate and extended. But I often still wonder: Does the fact that we are Irish have anything to do with it? Irish people are notoriously loud and somewhat obnoxious. Could that have anything to do with it? Maybe this is generational and from the very begining, the Mulvihills have been notoriously loud people.