hugs!

(Wow, Katrina, I didn't even know you were back from your business meeting! How was it?)

Anyway, we've got to talk about this hugging thing.
"When I was growing up in Kentucky (and I have yet to hear this phrase anywhere else), we'd talk about "hugging someone's neck" or "giving someone a big hug around the neck." Out My Back Door

I remember my grandmother singing "I love you, a bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck" and that is everything that I know about neck hugging. I barely know about the other kind, it seems.

See, I was raised on the outskirts of Philadelphia and spent more than half my life (which is a long story for another time) at my grandparents' house deep in the heart of the old money Main Line. People over the age of three or four did not hug; it simply Was Not Done. Men shook hands - if it were a particularly emotional moment, one might grasp the other's elbow with his free hand - and women briefly touched cheeks whilst making little "mmmwa" sounds. Older female adults were permitted to kiss children, an operation universally loathed by the kissee, but unless so accosted children shook hands with adults of either gender, and did so quite solemnly. Female children might be permitted a shy smile, but that was all, regardless of the degree of gushing on the part of the adult.

But the world is bigger than it used to be, and we now routinely marry outside of our accustomed ...what shall we call it?....genre, maybe. I married into a family of Huggers, a large family of Huggers. People I barely knew would greet me and then clutch me as though I'd been lost at sea for weeks, completely oblivious to my awkward embraces and uncertain pat-pat-pats. Even children - big boys, my size but barely teenagers - would scoop me into mammoth hugs, and the women would not only hug but often actually kiss, leaving lipstick marks. By the end of the evening, I would feel as though I'd survived a peculiarly affectionate mosh pit.

I grew to accept this overdose of physicality as a family trait, and braced myself for it at every meeting. And I do mean every meeting - even if you'd had lunch together the day before, hugs were still in order, both at the greeting and at the parting.

After we'd moved north and I was reconnecting with some friends here, I discovered that these previously orderly people had metamorphosed into Huggers and favored long, close clasps with much patting. I also realized that the family hugs I'd learned about had been mercifully short, while these folks hugged for a long damn time, whole paragraphs being exchanged while still in the embrace.

And how do you signal that you wish to be released from a hug? I tried stopping the pat-patting, hoping that would signal the end of the hug, but no dice. I tried sort of pulling my head back, and had that signal misinterpreted into a kiss-me signal and got kissed as well as hugged. I finally just learned to stand still and eventually the hug would be over. Don't misunderstand, these are all people whom I love dearly; I just wasn't brought up to expect all this hugging business.

I'm trying to get over my anti-hugging training, because I realize that hugging should be a lovely happy thing. I just can't get out of my mind, though, the image of my hugging-raised husband embracing my Aunt Mimi, a big man with his long arms wrapped completely around a slight elderly woman who was standing straight as a stick, arms at her side, looking completely bewildered.

It's telling that on my friend's page, the little people hug, but when I tried to copy it over to here, well:

they just stand there awkwardly.

*sigh*