Many people my age spend way too much time embarrassed by their parents. They focus on the couple things they don't like about them instead of thinking about the many things they love and respect.
It’s strange to me when other people don’t have the same relationship with their family as I do with mine. Of course, every family is different and they all function the best in separate ways, but I cannot imagine having a different relationship with the people that have been around me my entire life.
Often when I’m at a friend’s house, they’ll get confused why I leave early enough to still spend time with my family before they go to bed or finish eating dinner. It’s not because I dislike my friends but because I really do enjoy spending time with my family.
My parents have been with me and celebrated my achievements from the start. I can’t imagine forcing myself to endure all the ear-bleeding elementary school orchestra concerts that they faithfully went to.
They’ve attended everything they could and supported me so that even when I was standing up on stage in the middle of the school day for the speaking contest, I could find them in the crowd and look towards them to encourage myself.
Perhaps one of the things that brings my family so close together is the plethora of shared experiences we’ve had. We spend almost every weekend together amassing countless inside jokes and getting to know each other extraordinarily well, much better than I know most of my friends.
My sister and I have never had a “peaceful” relationship. From the time we were kids, we’d fight as often (or more often) as we’d get along. But in the end, it just brought us closer together. We learned to work things out and fought until we both got our voices heard. We now understand each other perfectly just by exchanging a glance. Our senses of humor have developed and changed until they fit each other effortlessly and we can laugh at the exact same things.
And it’s all of these things that make leaving so hard. It’s easier when someone leaves me -- there’s nothing I can do to change it. It’s harder when I’m leaving them because I know the whole time that I could have prevented it.
No longer will I be able to sit across the dinner table from my sister and look up into the skylight and wave at her. No longer will I be able to hand my cat off to my dad, joking about whose cat she really is. No longer will I be able to tell my mom that she really honest and truly does wear too much sunscreen.
Of course, nothing is permanent and I will be back. But my life will go on and the lives of everyone in my family will go on and at some point, these pathways will diverge. The paths that were going the exact place for so long will split and we will grow apart.
But the memories I’ve made with my family will never change. And they will keep growing. I’ll never forget the time we heard British school kids yelling about bananas. Or the time my parents left on a “party boat.”
And that’s what’s important.
It’s important not to stay together every moment of the day, but to remember the times we’ve had and to make sure we make time for each other in the future. It’s important to keep making these memories and to keep in touch and keep our relationships current and refreshed.
It’s important to keep these relationships we’ve had for such a long time, but it’s also important to leave room to let them grow.
And so we will.
