How on Earth did they do it?
A photo of my dad at around my age now.
A month into Denmark and I feel like I’m hitting a rhythm. The days are starting to become boring, I’m having those normal work desires (no job will make any days off less enticing) and weekends are bisected with laundry, errands, and exploring the capital region. Even if I know if it’s not true, I hope that my parents felt a similar feeling as they settled in the United States. I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately because I think this experience will be the closest I get to understanding a fraction of what they went through. One thing that I won’t ever understand is how they did all of that while having my sister and I. I’m the age now that my dad was by the time my sister was born and when I really think about it, how on earth did my parents do that?
As not great parents as they were, it’s clear that they were also still figuring it out too just like am now. The idea that my mother was 24 is wild to me because at 24 I remember how much I didn’t know about anything and yet they had to pretend. At 24 I just learned what community felt like for the first time, I had a mental breakdown that would ultimately make me take a year off of architecture that would be one of the best decisions I made, at 24, I was reminded of how much I thought I knew myself but didn’t.
24 was a year of insecurity and that insecurity led to excessive drinking and rash decisions, but that was also the year I learned to lean on others. The river of all of my insecurities burst the dam wide open and let almost all of the depression, anxiety, and anger pour out. I’ve had that happen before when I moved from Seattle to Orlando, but this time there were so many people to help me start rebuilding that dam that it didn’t take long for me to get back on my feet. I don’t think my parents ever got that, so for the rest of their life, every time that they faced these same insecurities, it just came pouring out without anything to help put it back and my sister and I were caught right at the burst point.
New places that are unfamiliar will do that for you, in Copenhagen, I miss fried chicken, I miss spicy food, I miss asian food, I miss latin food, I miss going to the grocery store and not spending a fortune, I miss good to god real sriracha, I miss my friends… The list goes on and if I stop to think about it, those desires would consume me and turn me into my parents. What’s stopping me? Feels selfish to say but I decided to do this, I followed my gut and it led me here after years and years of failing. Here, I don’t miss car centric cities, I don’t miss reading about mass shootings every day, I don’t miss fearing that if I got sick I would have to decide how much my life is worth, and I don’t miss trying to “debate” that my life deserves just the same amount of rights as a cis white man.
As for my parents, I wish that we could of got to a place where I could share these feelings with them because I think we could of had a really good conversation about these feelings but they have to recognize those feelings first. They could of told me some shortcuts or some things to avoid but to be honest, I don’t even think they know how they did it. Maybe asking “how” is the wrong question, maybe it’s just savoring every moment of this confusion and noise, so when the clarity comes we can see how far we’ve come.