The Family Ties That Bind

How a cheesy '80s TV sitcom theme-song earworm can teach us about family and ourselves

---

My aunt is back in the hospital.

When I got a call from the manager at my aunt’s assisted living facility telling me that the paramedics had taken Arlene to the ER, I was dumbfounded.

Just two weeks ago my aunt had x-rays taken on her spine, and they showed that the L1 fracture — the injury necessitating me to live in her room for a week to nurse her back to semi-mobile health — had completely healed. Her doctor was thrilled with her recovery. He said there was no need for her to wear her back brace anymore.

After that call with her doctor, I’d heaved a sigh of relief, then knocked on wood, hoping that I could finally focus on my own life for at least a couple of months.

Apparently it was laminate that I knocked on.

This time, the manager said, it was my aunt’s hip or maybe her upper leg that was hurting her. It was unclear. Arlene couldn’t get up from her recliner without screaming out in pain. And so the paramedics were called. This all happened about an hour ago, she told me.

Fuck.

Photo by Mat Napo on Unsplash

I have probably 40 medical-related phone numbers stored in my contacts. 35 of them are numbers for the various hospitals, ERs, medical offices, physical therapists, and billing departments I’ve needed to coordinate with in regards to my aunt’s care.

Being a DPOA (durable power of attorney — my durability becoming less and less certain), can feel like being hired for a full-time job where you are never told what your responsibilities are, you don’t get paid and you can never quit.

I became my aunt’s DPOA, officially, in the heart of the pandemic. This was before any vaccines were available, when people were dying left and right and we were sanitizing our groceries.

At the time, my aunt was living alone in her mobile home, where she’d lived for more than 20 years. I go into more detail about those challenging days in a piece I wrote last summer which you can read below (or click the blue link).

A quick summary: because of Arlene’s worsening cognitive impairment (dementia was yet to be diagnosed), I had to move fast to get legal control of my aunt’s finances and care. I talked to a lawyer, got all the proper forms filled out, witnessed and notarized, and hired a live-in caregiver who stayed with her until it was safe to move her into assisted living.

You're Older Than You've Ever Been

Dealing with aging parents and aunts and uncles is a reality for many people around my age (50s). When my wife and I go out to dinner with our friends, a good percentage of our conversations revolve around caring for our senior family members.

Most people, though, have siblings and/or cousins who can help — or hinder — with elder care. As my aunt has no kids and my sister died several years ago, it’s just me left to handle the logistics for my aunt. And, soon enough, I’ll need to do a variation of the same for my parents. All of them in their 80s.

Some days I’m glad it’s just me. Glad that I don’t have to negotiate with siblings who might have other (misguided) ideas on how care should be managed. I hear countless stories of families torn apart from the stress around dealing with their sick, dying or recently departed loved ones.

I’ve had to learn so much about the legal system, the medical and insurance systems, how to sell a house that isn’t yours in 18 days (a future earworm story for sure), and so much more.

But as capable as I have become over the years, there’s plenty I don’t know and a lot that I need help with.

Trusting that doctors, nurses, assisted living caregivers, administrators and other professionals I coordinate with will do what they promise is hard for me. I’ve witnessed the ball dropped so many times that I feel like I need to stand behind them at all times with a safety net. Stand behind them with a bullhorn, barking out reminders that my aunt exists and needs to be prioritized.

That I exist and need to be prioritized.

Even though in my last piece featuring The Eels “Not Ready Yet,” I sang the praises of my more “healthy” nighttime supplement regimen for sleep management — Lavela, Melatonin and guided meditations — if I’m being honest, the last few days I’ve been dipping into the NyQuil again, as my over-active, anxious, hyper-vigilant brain has returned in full force.

Even when I do fall asleep within an hour of getting in bed, I’m invariably awake again 90 to 120 minutes later, my brain chattering away mid-argument, fighting with any number of nemeses: doctors, social workers, administrators, random strangers, literal monsters, it almost doesn’t matter who it is — the theme is the same: I am not being heard.

Sometimes these dream arguments have soundtracks. “Gonna Fly Now” from Rocky I, for example. Or perhaps Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting.”

Last night that earworm was the theme to the 1980s TV sitcom, Family Ties, “Without Us.”

I refer to the Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams version of the song, not the original, composed by Jeff Barry and Tom Scott and performed by Dennis Tufano and Mindy Sterling, which was used for the first ten episodes of season 1. Apparently the producers were displeased with the original, and wanted more soulful, recognizable voices.

The first minute of the below video is the original version of the song for comparison.

It was definitely the right move. Mathis and Williams gave the song the smooth, sensual, emotional vibe that was missing from the original.

It does seem a bit odd, though, that a song that is clearly about romantic love between two people was used as a theme for a show about a suburban white family with three kids.¹ I can't think of another show that incorporated an iconic theme song that lyrically clashed with the actual themes of the show more than this one for Family Ties.

I bet we’ve been together for a million years,
And I bet we'll be together for a million more.

Oh, It's like I started breathing on the night we kissed,
And I can't remember what I ever did before.

What would we do baby, Without Us?
What would we do baby, Without Us?

And there ain't no nothing we can't love each other through.

What would we do baby, Without Us?

Am I crazy? These lyrics seem appropriate for a family sitcom? Even if I were to use the “us” in the lyrics to refer to the entire Keaton clan, what about “It’s like I started breathing on the night we kissed”? Can’t really get past that line.

And why am I realizing this discrepancy now? It’s kind of obvious, no?

I’m pretty sure that my dream-self was unaware of this conundrum when it chose to make “Without Us” my earworm on the same night that my aunt was re-admitted to the hospital.

The earworm was being more general, more nostalgic. More symbolic. It was reminding me of the importance of family and of the importance of Family Ties.

My family watched Family Ties (and, for five years, the show that aired right before, The Cosby Show) together every Thursday night when I was in junior high and high school.

I didn’t relate to Alex P. Keaton’s conservative politics, but I did relate to his false bravado and desire to be seen as cool while knowing he wasn’t cool at all.

And it was rare to see a short-statured leading man on TV. Michael J. Fox was 5’4” tall and I was 5’3” so seeing him thrive as a movie star in Back to the Future and Teen Wolf, in addition to a star on Family Ties really did wonders for my insecurities around my own stature.

I had forgotten what a well-acted, often quite serious show Family Ties was. Themes of alcoholism, depression, death, romantic breakups and other heavy topics were tackled gracefully, head-on, with sensitivity and humor.

All the main actors were excellent on the show — Michael Gross as Steven Keaton, Meredith Baxter-Birney as Elyse Keaton, Justine Bateman as Mallory, and Tina Yothers as Jennifer — but Michael J. Fox’s comedic and dramatic acting chops were a cut above pretty much everyone else on TV at the time.

I recently edited a video tribute to show creator Gary David Goldberg (no relation) for a freelance client and needed to scan through several seasons of Family Ties searching for iconic moments, and found myself (re)watching entire episodes. I’d expected it to appear extremely dated and tone deaf. I was surprised at how pertinent many of the episodes still were.

The way the show tackled issues around opposing political viewpoints — Alex’s conservative Republican views often butting heads with his left-leaning democrat parents — was a dynamic rarely portrayed on television before or since.

With the so-called “prestige TV” era of the past 20 years seeming to be nearing its end, one would think several shows like Family Ties, featuring a family with differing political views would have arisen. Especially since 2016, and the extreme polarization between right and left today. I do wonder how a show like Family Ties would be construed — and misconstrued — if released now.

Many shows from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s are being remade again. Bewitched, The Jetsons, Frasier, Nash Bridges, The Wonder Years. Just to name a few.

Fingers crossed they don’t try and remake Family Ties.

The ties we have to our families run deep.

Even amid the most dysfunctional of clans, we can feel beholden to our parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins. They’re family — of course we do what we can to help them.

Some people are clear and certain at verbally defining their boundaries and not budging from them. They have learned (usually the hard way) that it’s a fine line between kindness and generosity and becoming a bottomless resource for dependency and enabling.

When we state our boundaries, when we don’t come running, when we aren’t quick to put our lives on pause to help a struggling relative, we are seen as cold and heartless.

My aunt has no kids. Her brother, my father, is 84 and has his own health concerns. In terms of friends, Arlene has pushed away all but one of them, a wonderful woman who lives 45 minutes away from the assisted living facility and who I need to be judicious with when asking for help.

I struggle with figuring out where my boundaries are. They feel like constantly moving targets.

I’ll spare most of the details of what happened after my aunt was taken to the hospital the other day. Here’s the cliff notes.

It was finally determined that Arlene has bulging discs in her lumbar spine. This likely caused her hip and leg pain. Treatment will be a combination of physical therapy and pain management. The caregiver I hired to help Arlene after her spinal fracture will be extending her care a few more weeks.

It was a whirlwind mess of a couple days (replete with car breaking down and waiting two hours for a tow). But things seem to be stable-ish again.

I’ll be driving down to southern California in a few weeks to handle my aunt’s follow-up medical appointments.

Hopefully my Aunt can stay out of the hospital until then.

I’ve knocked on about ten redwood trees to make sure.

Are you old enough to have watched Family Ties when it originally aired from 1982 to 1989? Have you watched it since?

Are there any theme songs from TV sitcoms that you have a particularly deep fondness for? What show and why?

Original songs for TV shows — songs with lyrics that is — disappeared for a couple decades. Are they back? I know that longer opening credits sequences have returned in recent years, but I can only think of examples of recognizable songs or covers of popular songs. In the AppleTV+ show Panchinko, they expertly use The Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live For Today.”

Where are the original TV show theme songs? Are they used mostly in kids’ programming?

Discuss in the comments!

1. In season 3 episode 17, Elyse (Meredith Baxter-Birney) gave birth to child number 4, Andrew “Andy” Keaton. I left that reference out because, well, I’d already moved out of my parents’ house by then and Andy was kind of annoying.