E-Mail This Article to a Friend A family affair How to survive the annual return home without (technically) murdering any of your relatives BY STEVE ALMOND

IT WAS LEO Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, who began one of his really, really long books with the following sentence: "All happy families are happy alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."

This is actually a loose rendering of the original Russian. A more literal translation would read: "There is no fucking way on earth I’m going home for the Passover holidays."

But that’s Leo. He was a Russian, prone to depression; he had lots of sex with his serfs; and his flatulence is pretty much a matter of historical record.

I myself don’t mind heading home for the Passover holidays. And by home I mean back to California, where long ago, under the loving tutelage of my parents, I grew into the sort of man who still eats peanut butter from the jar with his fingers.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks have somewhat more conflicted feelings about returning home. They fear that seeing family again will reopen the half-healed wounds of childhood, provoking terror, self-loathing, guilt, and unsightly weight gain.

Which it pretty much will.

This is the bad news.

The good news is that there are ways to minimize the trauma. It’s just a matter of keeping in mind a few basic rules.

1) Your family is kryptonite.

I happen to love my family. They are totally sweet, admirable people. They also happen to know where all my buttons are and how to push them, and even though they have no intention of pushing said buttons, they do, over and over.

My father will often ask me about my financial situation and, for example, whether I honestly believe that storing my money in a shoebox is the "smartest investment strategy out there."

My mother will circle around the issue of whether I have any special friends, which really means a girlfriend, which really means Are you ever going to get married, which really means Where the hell are my grandchildren? Then she gives me an oriental rug. I cannot explain the causal relationship here, except to suppose that embedded deep in the Judaic psyche is the belief that the ability to cover one’s entire apartment floor with oriental rugs deems one worthy of matrimony.

The important thing to remember is that your family is not trying to mess with you. They are simply doing their job.

2) You will regress.

This is completely natural. To quote Freud, whose seminal essay "The Psycho-Dynamics of Familial Visitation" was written after a holiday spent with his own parents: "Nani-nani boo boo! My papa is a poop face!"

I myself celebrated my recent visit home by getting my driver’s license suspended.

Of course, I refused to tell my parents this, as I was too afraid it would make me look immature.

Thus, the following dialogue ensued:

Me: I may need to borrow a car at some point.

My mother: We need our cars for work.

Me: I’d only need a car for an hour or so.

My mother: Why can’t you rent a car?

Me: I don’t need to rent a car.

My mother: Don’t be silly! Your father and I are happy to rent you a car.

Me: Inaudible.

My mother: It’s settled then!

But it wasn’t settled, of course, because you can’t rent a car with a suspended license (trust me on this one), which meant I had to skulk around in a state of humiliated petulance and beg my parents for the use of a car, which is essentially how I spent my adolescence.

3) You will eat more than is healthy.

I can’t explain this, except to note that the heightened anxiety of returning home acts on my digestive system like a tapeworm.

The moment I step into my mother’s house, I simply open my craw and stuff in everything that will fit.

Part of this is a basic effort to satisfy my mother’s desires. She likes to see me eat. If there were a cable TV channel that showed nothing but my brothers and me eating, she would watch it around the clock. (We are talking about a woman who had 52 matzo balls in her refrigerator for my last visit.)

There are some who would suggest that my hunger is also an attempt to seek the nurturing I did not receive as a child. This may also be true. But I tend to regard my gluttony as part of an unconscious strategy to make sure I get plenty of sleep by inducing a food coma.

4) Do not fight with child relatives.

Now that my brother Dave has spawned, I have a couple of nephews to play with. Given my own regressed state during visits, this is a somewhat perilous arrangement.

By which I mean: I feel a compulsion to tussle with the kids.

I do not recommend this course of action.

Both Daniel (age four) and Lorenzo (age three) are only too happy to fight with me, by which I mean that nothing makes them happier than smacking me in the head.

The problem is that, after 50 or so smacks, I inevitably smack them back, which leads to one or both of them bursting into tears and running to tell their mother on me.

5) It is all right to embarrass your family.

There really isn’t a lot you can do to fight the old family ghosts. But I’ve found that a little well-placed humiliation does wonders for my state of being.

For instance, on this most recent visit, I told my cousin Abby a story involving horse sex. Abby is not the sort who does well with equine eroticism. She does better with balloons and clowns. She teaches kindergarten.

So it probably wasn’t so nice to put her on the spot. But you have to remember that visiting family is a high-pressure gig. It requires that you find innovative ways to blow off steam.

6) Count your blessings.

Look, unless your last name is Manson or Hitler or Cheney, it could be a lot worse.

The truth is that your family is never as bad as you think they are. They are basically sweet people who happen to drive you a little nuts.

You need to be thankful for the little things: the memories, the matzo balls, the chance to sleep for hours on end.

And, lest we forget, the plane ticket home.

Steve’s mother may guilt trip him at www.bbchow.com