You Pick Your Parents
ONE MORNING WHEN I WAS TEN or so, I found myself sitting across the kitchen table from my dad. In my decade on the planet, I couldn’t remember another time this had happened. That morning the kitchen was warm. Or maybe I was. I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. Through the opened back door, the sun streamed into the kitchen and landed on the linoleum. I eyed the doorway and our cement backyard. On the breeze I smelled the ocean, which was five blocks away. I planned my escape.
“Look at me,” Dad said.
My eyes met his for a second, and then they skittered away.
Cat and mouse.
What was I afraid of?
I’ll tell you. I was afraid of telling him the truth. If I opened my mouth I would tell him exactly how I felt. I’d let go of the anger I held tight to, the rage that kept my spine rigid. And then what? I don’t know…Maybe I’d start to scream and never stop, uncontrollable.
Moments passed. I glanced at him. A grin spread across his face.
“You know you pick your parents.” He leaned across the table. I smelled stale beer and vodka, the scent of pot on his denim jacket.
This time I looked him right in the eyes, brown to brown. Anger held my stare with his.
“What?”
“You are responsible for choosing who your parents are,” he said.
I imagined myself as a soul in heaven looking down at my dad and saying, “There, that’s the man I want to be my father. See that handsome man with the warm brown eyes and the quick grin. I want him. Who cares if he parties every night with his buddies and leaves my mom at home alone? Who cares if he loses control? I want the man who will get six DUIs and goes to jail, almost dies in a motorcycle accident and can’t remember what happened, to be my dad. That man right there is the one for me.”
I sat stunned into silence by my dad’s accusation. I’d been complicit in choosing this life, this chaos.
Did I really have control all along and didn’t know it?
What a powerful or hopeless idea depending how you looked at it.
