Becoming Our Parents

The details of the argument are never important after the fact, but there was a miscommunication about money, hundreds of dollars of it, and fragile under the stress, I turned red with anger and combusted like an exploding fire hydrant uninvitedly flooding the streets. And then I pointed at Him, jabbing some invisible elevator button that would hoist me to a more commanding level, and said, “This is on you. Get your mother to write the fucking check, or that’s it.” I paced around in the middle of the road in front of my house, avoiding his touch that begged for patience and acceptance like the Artful Dodger, mumbling fragmented phrases: “So. Irresponsible.” “Fucking insane.” “I can’t believe it.” “It’s bullshit. Bullshit.” It didn’t matter that James and I had just spent the last two days doing nothing, but nevertheless enjoying the privacy of a house to ourselves: we slept until late in the afternoon, perused a local nursery, cut up fruit for a salad, imagined ourselves down the line growing and making our own food, working as a complimentary team, and watched Rick Steves show us Italy while we planned our semester abroad, enveloping into one another on the couch. No, none of that mattered now, and I was notoriously a bitch anyway, or at least too honest, which meant that I was entitled to scream and threaten to end our relationship, or if not entitled, then expected to. And I was, after all, living in the moment like a very enlightened woman, because the utter loss of so much money at that point in time made me sure we could no longer exist as a couple. Need reinforcement about female fury stereotypes? I’m your gal.

Later, after I had sufficiently infused my dialogue with “fuck” an appropriate number of times and made more exaggerated hand gestures than all my Italian relatives combined, and when the finances were on the path to resolution, I went upstairs, rummaging in a hat box for an appropriately uplifting, religiously inspired card to make out to His mother for her birthday. James, being the pure gold, rust-resistant medal of a man that He is, instantaneously forgave my behaviors, insisting against my self-deprecating words that, No, I was not crazy! Why would I ever think such an irrational thing? I had every right to be angry!

“How about this one?” I’d ask James, thrusting a card in His direction, and He’d respond gut-impulse: “No. She hates glitter. She’ll say, ‘that’s nice, but I wish it didn’t have glitter.’” “Why does she hate glitter? ‘Cause it gets all over the place?” I’d answer for myself, trying to focus on our conversation while my parents were cussing and shouting at one another, bursts of thunder and lightning, a few rooms down. James had nodded, and I suddenly dropped the pastel colored Hallmark creation and looked up at him. “I’m sorry. Really. Do you see?” I said in earnest. “It’s learned behavior. That’s how they communicate, and it hardly phases me anymore.” His face, ever gentle, paraded his understanding, and he said, “Let’s go downstairs. I don’t like it when people yell.” “Why?” I blinked, apparently only partially aware that loud arguments were unhealthy. “Because it makes me sad,” He said plainly, and I knew that that abstract declaration was as best as He could explain the sensation He felt.

As we made our way down the staircase and onto the front porch to sit hand-in- hand on the rickety wooden swing overlooking the garden, I thought about how no matter how much we all love our parents, the idea of morphing into them without our own consent makes for that cliché heart-sinking-to-the-bottom-of-stomach feeling in all of us. Later, I cried to James hysterically about how very similar we are to my mother and father, and how I didn’t want to wind up twenty years down the road sleeping in separate bedrooms, eating and watching television in different rooms, seemingly only talking to one another to argue. And I pointed out how very much he was like his own dad, and said I didn’t see myself going on forty, living in an inherited house in disrepair with no flushing toilet – that no, I couldn’t do that. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I needed him to reassure me that that wasn’t where my life was headed, especially if I decided to spend it with him, that I could do better than that, even though I was rotting away in the jungle-like humidity of a Baltimore summer, alone, while my friends headed abroad to third-world countries to assist in some noble, Peace Corps worthy cause, or moved to L.A. to work for big-name production companies, or landed internships with nationally renowned doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. James reminded me that we were composites of so many different people and ideas and places, not just our parents, and told me that the fears I was presenting were a commonality between us, and our awareness of them could help us to eliminate them, uproot our weeds with a garden hoe, and that together, we could create our own utopian-like Eden. His words, a mix of cooing and encouragement and urging allayed my trepidations better than any chamomile tea or hot bath or spontaneous shopping trip could have. True, I thought to myself, I may be a Fallen Eve, susceptible to imperfect ways – unrestraint anger, jealousy, vanity, and greed – but at least I have a companion who unrelentingly shows me that Paradise can always be regained.