my parents are coming
i’m super excited about my parents’ visit this weekend. it’s weird how our relationship has morphed and evolved over the years. i’ve always been close with my family, but i was more than excited to go away to college, strike out on my “own” (mostly financed by them, of course). if you’d asked me ten years ago, i probably would’ve said that of course i love my family, but i’d be fine being halfway around the world from them. growing up like i did gives you a strage dichotomy - your family is all you have and so you forge unusually strong bonds, but you become almost excrutiatingly indpendent. and thus you know when the time comes, you’ll be able to maintain those bonds, even if it’s from hundreds or thousands of miles’ distance. this is all still true, but i’m so psyched that for the first time in my adult life, my parents live within driving distance. this is quite a switch from their former assignment (japan) where they were oceans away! (you can read our exciting travel blog here, which chronicles the six weeks we spent in tokyo, followed by a month traveling asia.)
my parents have been to visit us in the city several times, and i always find myself making mental notes - my mom wouuld really like that place, my dad would enjoy that restaurant. now i have the opportunity to take them to these places more frequently than i did before. while my parents and i have our differences (duh), we’re extremely alike in a lot of ways. this makes it easy to figure out stuff to do, as i know we can easily spend an afternoon walking through the yves saint laurent exhibit at the de young, or indulge in a musical, or try a different ethnic food for every meal of the day.
i often find myself wishing my parents lived in the city - or at least in the bay area - so we could do more awesome stuff together. this is a far cry from my sentiments at 18, when - although i always felt emotionally close to my family - was fine with whatever physical distance was between us. guess time change things. and it’s definitely rendered one cliche true: the older you get, the wiser your parents become.
March 04 2009 10:39 pm | family and military and parents and san francisco and the city