A New Recipe for Parental Pride

I think this year my parents have become prouder of me than ever before. What have I done to deserve this? It's kind of a mystery: I have not secured myself a high-paying job, I haven't gone to graduate school, I'm not saving dying babies in Africa, I've done nothing that many parents would consider all that remarkable.

But it's all about expectations.

Recently I was having dinner with my friend Rob, discussing family and growing up, our specific histories. "I want to show you something," he said. "This is one of my favorite pieces of paper in the world." He handed me a roughly sketched graph. His father had drawn it when Rob graduated college to instruct him in choosing a career. High up on the positive side, "10" on the y-axis, was a corporate job: lawyer, business man. "Government" was the next category down, including a list of administrative jobs in various sanctioned government departments. Lower, but still barely within the range of respectability fell "Foundations." Then the x-axis. Below the x-axis (arbitrarily "-80") was a scribbled list: Nader, Greenpeace, ACLU, Sierra Club.

I laughed. Rob laughed. We've both spent the better part of our working lives in the section below the line. Fortunately, not doing so was never an expectation for me.

What I've done to make my parents proud is become more like them. This year I accomplished two things symbolizing that I'm moving in the right direction: for my mother, I planted a garden; and for my father I learned to ride a bicycle.

Mom's always been an almost obsessive gardener, and along with it, she freezes, cans, dries flowers and herbs, enters county fairs. I always maintained that I had no real interest in gardening, but then I bought a house. I found that I wanted to make my land do something, produce something. I wanted to turn soil and sunshine into food. So I called my mom and she talked me through it. She sent me seeds, and book after book on growing and preserving food. She has been wanting to do this for years; I finally gave her a window.

My father firmly believes that humanity's two best inventions are the hot shower and the bicycle. Yet, somehow, he never taught his only daughter how to ride a bicycle; that inability has stood as a monolith of failure in the middle of our relationship for as long as I can remember. This summer I decided I was done, done with the guilt, done with the embarrassment of not being able to do something that everyone over the age of 6 can do. I borrowed a bike and got a friend to go to an empty parking lot with me for a couple hours as I teetered around, and pretty soon I was riding whole miles all by myself. When I told him, Dad said "Well, it took you long enough," but I knew he was pleased. We now talk about what bike paths we'll take when I visit, and how much grocery shopping you can do with a backpack.

So it seems that my years of rebellion, of trying to take as distinctly opposite a path as my parents', are over. I've emerged as a product of both of them. As the child, it's hard to look in a mirror and see mom and dad, to hear them speaking through you as you talk, to sometimes catch their mannerisms controlling your movements. But as a parent, I can only imagine it's the most you could want: to see in your son or daughter all the elements you love most in your spouse and in yourself; even better, to see some of the least attractive parts jettisoned.

I'm not saying I'm there yet. I still have a long way to go before I can embrace all of my parents' best qualities as my own, and ridding myself of their particular shortcomings and follies is daily a challenge. But in my rebellion, I tried to become part of the "normal," the America that's on TV, where people shop at malls and drive everywhere and live in the suburbs with perfect lawns and have endless meaningless conversations, and I found it empty. I'm going back to an earlier time.