“We’re not dating, Mom,” I dismiss gruffly, tired from the two flights (the second one was a propellor plane to the teensy tiny Kalamazoo Airport and made me perspire nearly as much as Rory). “We’re just friends.”
I had to explain the same thing to Blake when I caught up with her during a layover phone call. She, of all people, should know that Rory isn’t my type, but she was infuriatingly skeptical when I insisted there was nothing going on between us.
“I wasn’t implying anything,” Mom defends. “Just don’t rule out having a friendshipevolve.”
And then she launches into the age-old story about how she and my dad had started out as friends in their high school science lab, and though there hadn’t been chemistry initially (she always pauses for a chuckle here, then fills it with her own hearty laugh), the Bunsen burner of their flame had heated up over time.
“Friendship is a good foundation to build on, that’s all I’m saying,” my mom finally concludes when we’re finally pulling in the snow-covered driveway of the small, split-level house where I grew up.
“Very enlightening,” I mutter dryly, kindly not pointing out how I don’t want a hohum relationship like hers and my dad’s. I want passion and romance and everything theirs lacks.
Christmas plays out in its typical fashion. Mom shoves trays of home-cooked food at me, rattling off every single ingredient she used, as if adding red onions to the chili instead of green onions is a life-changing development indeed. Dad cracks the beer and fills me in on how U of M’s football team would’ve and should’ve made the playoffs if the idiot coach hadn’t decided to go for it on fourth down instead of kicking a field goal.
My brothers, Sam and Dylan, join in the football rants too, while their wives, Krista and Lauren, fuss over their kids and compare proud notes on when they last slept through the night.Unfortunately, they’re not too exhausted to interrogate me on my love life. They’re are part of the Marriage Evangelist Cult (not an official organization to my knowledge, but it might as well be) and are convinced that life only starts when you have a ring on your finger. I can pretty much hear the pitying thoughts:Poor, poor Kat. Single and over thirty—practically an old maid!
Krista and Lauren ask me if there’s anyone special in my life this Christmas.
There are lots of special people in my life,I’m tempted to retort. But I don’t want them to think I’m bitter when I’m clearly not, so I just tell them no, I’ve gone on a few dates but no one has caught my eye.
Except the guy I was obsessed with on the double-decker bus, who’s actually also from Kalamazoo,I could add.But I fell out of love with him the moment he opened his mouth, so it’s irrelevant.
“City guys never want to settle down,” Lauren says, though I doubt she’s ever spent more than a long weekend in a big city.
“There’s still time for you,” Krista chimes in, as if she genuinely thinks she’s being helpful and not triggering my stress about how my biological clock is tick-tick-ticking.
Sam and Dylan tease that they’ll launch a podcast where bachelors can submit applications to be my trophy husband, and they’ll screen and interview the candidates for me. Mom snaps at them to stop making a joke out of my love life, but it actually makes me feel better that they can find some humor in all of it.
After a five-course feast, we waddle out of our chairs to go for a family walk to see the neighborhood lights, per tradition.
Night is falling but taking its time. The inland lake my parents live on is half frozen over, and late afternoon light reflects offthe thin sheets of ice, like sunshine on solar panels. Small houses made of synthetic siding are all cramped together, none hogging too much waterfront. Colored bulbs are strung joyfully from the roofs, and huge snow banks border the street. Most mailboxes are crooked, presumably from collisions with the pickup truck plow.
Walking this old route makes me remember little snippets of my childhood. Racing my brothers to the bus stop at the top of the hill. Building igloos and snow forts, pounding each other with ice balls. Tubing behind the McAllisters’ boat on the last day of school, four of us kids piled on one tube, bouncing and hollering as we veered out of the wake. And then devouring Mom’s famous grilled cheese sandwiches back at our house.
I don’t usually linger on the good parts about growing up here. The stories I tell myself are the bad ones. How awkward and shy and friendless I was. How I didn’t fit in and I didn’twantto fit in because fitting in here would mean having to make myself small to squeeze into a small box where the best you can hope for is mediocrity.
During my obligatory trips as an adult, these are the stories I’ve repeated. Cementing them in my memory helps prove to myself, and to other people, that I’m on the right path now.
But the daylight has slipped away, taking my smugness and sense of superiority along with it. I should feel more successful than my family, given how I’m raking in a large salary at a prestigious consulting firm in an international city and am on track to make partner.
But I don’t actually feel more successful. Not right now. I feel just as stuck as they are. More stuck, maybe, because they don’t seem to think they’re stuck. They think they’re free, whereas I feel trapped by the weight of everything I haven’t accomplished yet.
The thoughts cut me like an icy wind, and I’m newly aware of just how freezing it is out here. I ball up my fists in my gloves, trying to warm up, but it doesn’t help much.
Ever since I moved away at eighteen, I’ve been pushing myself so hard to reach my potential. To not stop or pause or hardly even breathe until I reach my dreams.
And yet what do I really have to show for all of the work? I’ve sacrificed relationships, morals, and sleep, and I’m barely more than a stranger to my own family. My salary is big, but I have little time to spend it—and no one to spend it with. Blake’s decision to scale back at work starts to make a little more sense, even though I’m not sure I want it to, because it threatens the narratives that hold my own life together.
There’s a certain empowerment in knowing that I don’tneeda partner—that I’m capable of providing for myself. But that doesn’t keep me from wanting to find that person who completes me and makes me feel like I was never actually living before meeting him.
What I haven’t wanted is to end up like my parents, two people who’ve managed to stick it out together, it seems, because they haven’t expected too much out of each other or out of life. Or at least that’s how it’s always looked to me.
But as the stars start poking out of the sky like rustic diamonds, I take a closer look at Mom and Dad, walking one in front of the other through the snowy street. I’d assumed they were spaced so far apart because they were too sick of each other to walk side by side, let alone hold hands. But now, suddenly yet slowly, I notice little details I haven’t before. Like how Mom, walking ahead of Dad, tests each footstep with her boots and reports back to Dad if there’s an icy patch (Dad had a hip replacement last year, so falling couldbe bad). He grumbles that he knows how to walk, but I can newly discern the gratitude beneath the gruffness.
Dad starts complaining about how stuffed he is, how he must’ve packed on ten pounds from dinner. But he does it in a way that compliments every single dish Mom made, and her whole posture perks up.
What I see in my parents is not a movie-worthy love story. But it’s a love story, nonetheless. Here are two people who are still choosing each other after thirty-some years together. Still trying to affirm each other in their respective love languages.
It’s more than a bit disorienting, thinking of my parents being this way. Being in love. But rather than making me feel lost, it makes me feel found.
