Genetics

I.

Personality is at least twenty percent genetic. My personality belongs, in part, to my parents. I am fascinated by their secret lives before my birth. I strain my ears for any hint of these distant people. I want to meet them, to sit and have coffee and joke with them, to find out who they are when they are not my mom and dad. To me, it’s as though they were made new when I came into the world. Who did they love most, before they loved each other? How did they come to be who they are? I yearn to understand this, because in knowing I might come to know why I was born, to glean some hint of my destiny from them. They tell me I have to find out for myself, that it’s not their responsibility. Sometimes, that is too difficult for me. I want the rigid surety of being told. The winding path of the self-made becomes tiring.

I certainly wouldn’t mind being the child whose parents told her how to live. I wouldn’t mind being frustrated with all the orders flung at me. It seems more productive than being frustrated with myself for not knowing enough about the world. Paradoxically, to give myself some certainty, I look toward my parents, who after more than 50 years, still do not live as they wish or know what they want.

II.

So, I find myself sitting with my parents’ photo box, devouring each picture. Once upon a time, there were four photo boxes, but three were lost when the basement of the farmhouse we used to call home flooded. When I think about it, my eyes burn and fill with tears for the moments I have lost. My parents aren’t the type to put photo albums together, to find the sequence and nail the memories down, not like me. They don’t even look at the pictures anymore, not unless I beg and peck and prod them to get it out and tell me this, that and the other, so that I can pin their history down for them.

I have never thrown away a picture, even a marred one. I have boxes of blurry thumb marks, over exposed shots, extreme close-ups of random body parts. Peculiar snapshots of our old dog, Ginger, standing on piles of snow, framed by my wayward fingers. I keep everything, even pictures where I look my worst. I don’t display them, though. They are the parts of myself that I can’t bear for others to see.

III.

My mother is invisible, caring for all her children with no praise for doing so. She is the keeper of cookies, the laundry machine, the voice on the phone calming your panic at two o’clock in the morning. Her face is lined with age, stress and cigarettes. Her hands are calloused from the garden, musty earth packed underneath her long fingernails. Occasionally, Mom will let me in on little secrets about her life before I was born. They come in the form of aphorisms, passed down in a voice disconnected from its owner. “I knew I loved your father the first time we made it by the river.” she says, when I explain that I don’t know what it means to be in love. Sometimes, the wisdom is darker. She was gang-raped and escaped out a second story window before they killed her. Her first husband broke her jaw. Inside me, the voice of my mother is hesitant, distant, muffled.

When I was raped, I still could not stand to tell my mother until the resulting pregnancy became something I could not ignore. So, I told her that it was intentional, that I loved the person, so she would stop asking questions. I didn’t want her to think she had failed. When I miscarried, she could not have known the depths of my relief.

IV.

My father is bald, and has been for as long as I can remember. He occasionally claims that Diet Pepsi and chocolate milk are the cause of this affliction. He is arthritic, stiff, wounded by hard work. When we talk, it is about war, cars, cowboys and sci-fi movies. His voice is still firm, even though his body is not. When I turned 16, I learned that my father is an alcoholic. When I turned 18, I learned that he wants to be a woman. Mom and I found him passed out in a purple velvet dress. I sat on the porch crying, not because I couldn’t love my father this way, but because I did not understand why he couldn’t tell me before. Mom came out, hugged me close and spoke to me in hushed tones about Dad’s other life.

“I know you’ll understand.” Mom said. “I know you will. But don’t tell anyone else.”

Later, my father told me that he would have had gender reassignment surgery if it weren’t for my mother. She told him they could be best friends if he decided to become a woman. My father chose my mother instead. He gave up alcohol for my mother, too. He sat in the bathroom for three days, alternately shaking and vomiting. I thought he was going to die. We resist ourselves to love other people.

V.

I make photo books for my parents, filling them up half-way then hoping that they will fill the rest in themselves. I make an effort to make their history available for analysis. My parents must have thirty half-filled photo albums gathering dust on the shelf. My photo albums are shelved, sequenced, oft-looked at. My history, I think, is preserved in them. They tell me who I am. I do not understand the part of myself that tells me this is important, as though memory were anything more than flimsy, stitched-up half-truths.

This Christmas, I keep telling myself, I won’t bother. I will get them something they actually want, rather than something I feel I need. Still, my mind plans it out, the order, the position, which pictures I will use. My brain works to patch things together, to make something whole and comprehensible out of the scraps.

VI.

I do not tell my parents who I am, or what I want. I do not tell them about what I have experienced outside the walls of their home. I do not open myself up, I do not make sacrifices. Perhaps, in some way, I have shaped my parents into who they are. If I could open my mouth and tell them who I am, I do not know what I would say.

I am a walking identity crisis. My self is based on my memory. What did I like once? What qualities did I value? How much of me is like them, and how much of me is just me? How much of my life will be weighted down by their pain? I smoke a cigarette, read a sci-fi novel. I have my father’s forehead and my mother’s nose. My personality belongs, in part, to my parents, who help me to be myself, who shape me, whose boundaries give me freedom. Today, it is sufficient.