Thirty years

As I understand it, my parents came together when my mom was in business school in Jackson, Tenn., doing her best to socialize with peers even though the bulk of her time was spent caring for her young daughter (my sister). Mom started hanging out sometimes with this gal named Cindy and Cindy had a brother named Steve. Cindy had Steve and my mom meet one night at a Jackson dance club and that was that. Cindy’s my aunt now. Oh, and I exist.

Dec. 21 was the day they made it official.

I don’t know how they’ve done it. I can’t imagine doing anything for thirty years, especially since I’ve not even been alive that long. But they did it. I’m amazed. And incredibly grateful. It is rare for a person my age to have made it this far with parents who still even speak to each other using polite phrases. More than any other element of my life, my parents have had an unbelievable impact on how I live. Sure, I might be a foul-mouthed heathen with extremely questionable taste in everything from men to music, but I think I turned out okay.

I didn’t get it when I was sixteen. My parents were tyrants who tried to control every aspect of my life, and my home life was terribly oppressive. Of course. But now I get it. They were attentive. They kept me out of trouble — my parents were the kind of parents who wouldn’t let me hang out with kids unless they could meet the kids AND their parents — and encouraged me to seek higher ground in all things when practical. Always climb when there was territory to be covered that I thought was worth exploring. I’ve never forgotten that. And to this day the thing that drives me is the notion of making my parents proud. That’s still it for me. Because what would make them proud would make me proud. For the most part.

I owe so much to them. To their union. To their ability to tell what I would need from them as I got older and their own discipline so that they would be able to provide that to me. To their insistence on instilling a real work ethic in me. To their stability. To their laughter. To their strategic building of my independence. To their willingness to let me be who I am in ways they don’t agree with. And to their unrelenting love in the face of everything else.

Just tonight, only my third or so Christmas Eve away from my family, my dad called to check on me and make sure I was okay alone. Yeah, I was okay. Lonely, maybe, but okay. He told me happy birthday, and how much I meant to him. I am a sentimental fool when given the chance, but I held it together. Earlier today my mom had called to make sure I was going to be able to get home (see? I still call their house “home”) Sunday for our celebration (since I was scheduled to work Christmas Eve and Day) before my dad had to go to work at 3. I could tell she was trying to make sure that we all got at least an hour or two together; our family deals with shift work and nurses on call and newspaper employees and hospice workers but we manage face time somehow every year. Because we are what’s important and we all know it.

Thirty years. They’ve made it work. They’ve had fun, too.

I simply could not be more grateful.