Crossroads

I stand at a crossroads, a metaphorical scale from one to ten where I am standing on the five not sure which way I want to go. My mother is fire and motion; my father is ice and stillness. I am the product of extremes, the offspring of opposites. Family is a funny thing: part genetics, part memory and emotion. I love my family. But there is a reason “blood is thicker than water”, is not the whole phrase. The friends and family you choose, the emotional and metaphysical alliances, the people you welcome in to your life when you have no obligation to do so often touch your life in more profound ways than even your closest relatives.

My mother is like a bouncing ball, it dropped when she was born and will not stop bouncing as long as she lives. Until I was seventeen, I averaged a new address for every year of my life. My mother likes change. Change for the sake of change, if for no other reason. If we did not move, the furniture would at least be rearranged or the walls painted. I do not mind change. I have learned to adapt. I change my hair all the time. The color, the length. Sometimes, I do it with no warning. I walked into a hair salon six years ago with hair five inches past my shoulder and asked for a bob. No warning. I wonder if I like change, or in some ways need it.

My father is like a boulder. He is immobile in life. He has worked at the same job for thirty years. Lived in the same house for twenty-nine. I see it. I see the draw to the house, the home, always there to welcome you back from your day. Even as it has fallen into disrepair, the stairs crumbling and foundation exposed, the knowledge that it is there in all its imperfections is a comfort. My father does not like change for any reason. Even change for the better. He has a water bed from twenty-five years ago, but all the water is gone so it is hardly a mattress now and yet it still lives in his room.

My father is a professor. He has been a professor for a long time. He has published no research recently or even in the last twenty years. He has not had much reason to. He does not work at a teaching University, but he has tenure anyway. He had enough research to get the job, and was made Chair of his department because no one else wanted it and ended up with tenure. He won awards for teaching, was voted best professor three times. He likes teaching, most days. He did not want to be the Chair. He does not want to be the department head. He does not want to be on any committees. He does not want a raise, not that he would turn one down. He just wants to teach. His ambition is to be a good teacher, but that is as far as his ambition extends. My mother says he is the least ambitious person she has ever met. He is not upwardly mobile, nor does he want to be. Content. Content is the word I think of most to describe his feelings about his career. He is fine where he is.

My mother is not, she never is. She was a Director, she is a Vice President. And now she is moving on to start her own consulting company and publish articles. She is ambitious. She is always looking for the next opportunity to move a little higher, learn a little more, and be a little better. It could be argued that they are both workaholics, with late nights in the office. But I think my father works late partially because he has no where else to go and in part because he wants to make sure he is always available to his students. My mother is a perfectionist. Perhaps, a little bit of a control freak. She likes to be in charge of things, to control things, and make things. She likes improving things. She is upwardly mobile in her career, through ambition and hard work, endless work. She would not take Chair of a department because no one else wanted it. She would not take it unless she thought she deserved it. And if she thought she deserved it, she would have already had it because she would have fought for it from the start.

My mother can be cruel in her desire to push me to be ambitious. She can be blinded by her own ambition and need for change. I learned a lot from moving so much. I learned to adapt and to make new friends quickly. But I also learned that friendships are often temporary, situational. When you move away you might make promises that you will stay friends and keep in touch, but it is not the same. Things change. Emotional distance grows with physical distance. Best friends become friends. Friends become acquaintances. The comfort of a home, a house, is in its stability and consistency, its ability to make you feel safe in unsafe times. The places we lived were all temporary, changing, and unpredictable. They were places we lived, but they were not home.

My father can be frustrating in his resistance to change. He is almost fifteen years older than my mother. His health has not been good for a long while. He has problems with his knees, his eyes, his Diabetes, his heart, his memory, and his stomach. He has issues with his balance. He fell down the stairs at work and broke his collar bone. He fell down his front steps on his walkway and broke his ankle. He fell down outside of the laundry mat and hit his head. And one night that I will never forget because I spent it in tears, he fell down on the side of the road and hit his head. There was so much blood. He took off his shirt to hold to his head and it was almost dyed red from it. He lives in a small town. A small town where the nearest hospital is almost twenty-five minutes away from both his home and office. The stairs need to be replaced. The bed needs to be replaced. I think he should move. I think he needs to move, but know that he won’t.

I could go on. From my father’s large, religious family background and my mother’s only sibling and atheistic upbringing to my mother’s early morning nature and wine appreciation to my father’s late-night routine and straightedge lifestyle. But the thing that I want to talk about most in their differences, is the way they handle relationships of all kinds.

My mother does not talk to her friends from high school. She paid for the wedding of one of her best friends and roommates in college, but they do not talk anymore. They did not have a fight or falling out. They grew apart. Emotional distance grows with physical distance. My mother moved away. She got married herself. Things changed and best friends became friends who became acquaintances. She does not speak to her friends from California, though we left only nine years ago. Her friends are her husband’s friends and her work colleagues. They live in filtered form. You cannot complain to your husband’s best friend’s wife about your husband. You cannot complain to your boss about your boss and your employee certainly cannot complain to you about you. You cannot be yourself if you have to filter what you say. If you cannot be yourself, then the friendship cannot be true or real. If you are not open, they cannot be open either. Besides, she is often busy as ambition drives her to see, do, achieve, and friendships sometimes need to take a back burner to that. It is not necessarily a bad thing. It is what she values, what makes her happy. She is the most extroverted introvert anyone could ever meet.

My father talks to his friends from high school. He talks to his friends from University. His best friend in college died in an accident, and my father still writes his widow letters every once in a while, to wish her well. They live all across the country. He does not see them, but he writes to them. He emails them. He recently figured out Facebook. They do not write back. No, they do in a way. He will receive the odd Christmas card or email with the family newsletter. Occasionally, someone will let him take them for lunch. He tries so hard. He puts so much of himself, his time, his affection, and his loyalty into each relationship. He is all in. He is himself and he is always present and open. But it does not matter if a door is open, if there is no one to walk through it. All his effort to holding on to the thread that keeps them connected seems wasted if they are not holding on at the other end. A friendship cannot be one-sided. Sometimes, you need to let people go, especially when they have already let you go. But he often will not, because he craves and values relationships. They energize him and make him happy. He is the most introverted extrovert.

In romantic relationships, I can hardly describe my father as I have no real experience with him in one. He had a friend who liked a girl, the girl liked his friend. His friend dated the girl, dumped her, and remarried. The girl still liked his friend. My father always liked the girl. For over thirty years, he liked her. She used him and “friend-zoned” him.

But he loved her anyway. His college girlfriend and my mother were the only two serious relationships he ever had. And after my mother, he never dated anyone. He loves like he loves his friends, wholeheartedly and sometimes without warrant or reason. It can be dangerous. I see how it hurt him seeing the woman he loved, who did not love him, flirt with him when she was bored or looking to boost her ego only to date men ten years younger than them both or simply dismiss him. She is the closest “friend” to him in terms of distance. When he broke his ankle and ended up in the hospital. He called her for a ride. She was home, but did not answer. He left a message, she did not respond. He let her know he was injured and asked her for help. She never called back. When he needed to get the cast off, he took a taxi. It would be six months before she contacted him again, suggesting they go out for dinner where he would inevitably have had to pay. He still loved her. Love does not make sense.

My mother has been married three times and engaged four times. I do not remember a time where she was single, where she did not at least have a male best friend that filled the role of “boyfriend” in an unofficial capacity, with holding hands and nights out. She sometimes will tell me that if I do not start dating soon, “to practice”, I will die alone. I love my mother, but on this point, I disagree most. She is from a different generation, marriage was more important. It was part of everyone’s life plan to eventually get married. It is not part of mine. If it happens, it happens. But the idea that without one I will be alone, dismisses the value of friendships, in my opinion. One of my best friends lives two doors down. My mother shared with her, her concerns for me. “What if her father dies and I cannot be there to help out with things,” she said, “she will be all alone to deal with it.”

“No,” my friend responded, “I would be there with just a phone call.”

I love my mother. I love my father. But I do not want to end up like either of them. I do not want to be like either of them. I do not want to be immovable or unstoppable. But what choice do I have, I used to ask. It is genetics. It is both nurture and nature. It is my history, so how could it not be my future. I have to fall somewhere. Maybe I will end up like one or the other living as “too this” or “too that”. Or maybe I will be forced to stand in the center, forcing myself to play mediator, to maintain the balance of the extremes. The truth is: it might very well be inescapable. The future is a mystery. Great thinkers and philosophers have long debated whether it is set in stone and we are uncovering it, or if we make it as we go along. Either way, the future comes with every second that goes by turning it into the past.

My oldest friend and I met in seventh grade; her name is Ashleigh. We shared a middle name and some friends. We were just acquaintances, who became friends, who became best friends. She was the person I hung out with. I followed her, she followed me. We skipped class together and ate lunch together. We told each other secrets and fears. My mother hated her. My father never met her, but would have liked her. She was not a good influence on me. I was not a good influence on her. We often ditched class to go hang out at the 7/11 a few blocks from the school, where our friend Anna would get chips with her nacho cheese only if the clerk at the store made her. That was almost twelve years ago now.

She understood my reservations about growing up to be like my parents. Her mother had severe bipolar disorder and did not like to take her medication, but did like to self-treat with alcohol. Ashleigh does not drink, because her mother drank and she does not want to be like her. She saw the damage it did to her health and relationships.

My sixteenth birthday coincided with my going-away party. We were moving to Canada. Ashleigh and all my other friends came to the party. We sang karaoke badly and watched movies that were so bad or weird that sometimes thinking back I wonder if they were real. After I moved, we lost touch. I expected it. I expected to become friends, then acquaintances. And we did. Until she moved to Ohio. She was physically no closer, but she understood what it was like to move and leave everything behind. We started talking then, and I learned that friends might become acquaintances but as long as acquaintances can become friends, friendships can be restored again.

She and I still talk everyday, not in person but we text. I share a lot of videos that I think she will find funny and she shares stories and books she thinks I will enjoy, just little things to let each other know we are thinking about the other.

One day, about a year ago now, I was debating what color to dye my hair. Naturally, my hair is brown. I have had just about every other color in my hair, but not red. I had red as streaks or tips, but never all over. I liked being blonde, but it blended in to my skin tone and was hard to maintain both in controlling roots and keeping it from turning highlighter yellow or worse, green. Black was fun too. It was a favorite of my friends too. It was a stark contrast to my skin tone and while it was easier to maintain, it was even harder to get rid of. I had wanted to do red for awhile, but something always stopped me. My mom has red hair. My hair was short again and, though it was shorter than hers, I was concerned it would be copying her to dye my hair red too.

I was talking to Ashleigh about this and she said, “So what? No one else will know that.” And as I thought about it, I realized she was right. We talked some more and through poorly auto-corrected messages and grammatically incorrect thoughts with little to no punctuation, she basically said the following:

“Sometimes I think you are so scared of being like your parents that you are not yourself. You are so focused on being different from them that you cut off pieces of yourself or do not do things you enjoy for reasons that are, quite frankly, stupid. Because in the grand scheme of things, no one knows both your mother and father. And no one knows either the way you do. You are the only one using them as a measuring stick for your life. And if they are as opposite as you say, you will always fall somewhere in between, but if you spend all your time and energy focusing on where you fall, you will miss out on being you.”

It is not what I wanted to hear, but it is probably exactly what I needed to hear. She was right. I did take a step back sometimes from things, because I did not want to be “too” anything. In class and tutorials, when I knew the answer or had a thought, sometimes I would keep my hand down anyway, not wanting to be “too loud” or seem “too eager”.

I once bought a beta fish at Walmart because I thought it was going to die. Beta fish cannot be in a tank together, because they will fight each other. For this reason, Walmart sells them in Tupperware containers not unlike what soup comes in from Chinese restaurants. This particular fish was one of four. Its fins were shredded and black. It clearly had fin rot and did not look like it had much life left. The three just like it on the shelf were already dead. I bought it so it could die in a real tank surrounded by colorful, glass rocks and bright green, plastic seaweed. I spent about forty dollars getting two tanks and the specific salt that is supposed to help with fin rot, not thinking it would work at all but hoping it might at least ease his pain. Every two days, I switched its tanks and cleaned it out. I was only visiting my father for three weeks, so had not been planning to saddle him with a fish. But, the fish lived. He actually went on to live for another three years, until the cleaning staff at my father’s office moved his tank to the window sill where he got too much sun one day. But, he was not really supposed to live at all. The story came up in class one day and everyone said I was “too nice” and “too caring”. It was supposed to be a good thing, I think, but it made me feel uncomfortable. I did not like being “too” anything.

But Ashleigh was right. I was too busy judging myself or trying to change myself based on what I thought I should or should not be. I was comparing myself to others when I should have been just trying to be the best person I could be regardless. She knows me better than anyone, she could see that I changed with my mother or father and knew who I really was regardless of what I ended up doing. Family can be close, I don’t doubt that. But it is friends that see all sides of you. It is my friends who know the me that writes essays for fun as well as the me that ditches class or puts assignments off to the last minute. It is my friends that know the side of me that cries at Budweiser commercials and the side of me that plays video games where I get to shoot things when I am really upset. It is because of the way they know me and the trust I have in them that they can make me see and realize things about myself that my family could not. They know me, they see me even when I no longer do.

I stand at a crossroads of possibilities, of possible “me”s. It is highly probable, I will end up like my mother or my father in at least some aspects. It is even more likely I will be “too” something, at least to someone. But I trust in the friends I have made, who have taught me about relationships and myself. I have faith that when I need them, even if we may grow apart for awhile, that they will be there and that if I stray from who I am, they can set me back on track. They will call me out when I am doing something stupid or wrong. And in the end, when I actually choose who I want to be based on what I want, not what others want, they will be there to support me and tell me that red looks nice, even if they preferred black.