Aside from the same high school,
there was only one thing that my mom
and dad had in common.
Goulash.
My mom, who raised us, would cook
casseroles, meat loafs, boxed or meat & potatoes meals, and goulash. My dad,
when we visited a month in the summer, cooked gourmet pizzas, pastas, prime
beef cuts, salads, and goulash.
Working a full time job and raising
3 boys alone isn’t easy. On anyone. The oldest takes over as “dad”, the middle
gets forgotten and the youngest, “spoiled.” Mom is constantly tired and looking
for a diversion or a relief from stress. Any new men need to realize there is
one looking to protect, one who wants left alone, and one that is starving for
attention.
That last one was me. The youngest.
The unexpected.
At this point I feel like I have
(and struggle with) a choice in which way to take this initial post or even
this blog. Do I play up the difficulties of growing up the youngest in a broken
home, accentuating how much I have struggled to find a definition for my
personhood apart from the void I felt in only having a solid father for the
whole of 6 years of my adolescence and beyond? How I dealt with an age gap that
had my older brothers 2 years apart, and me coming unexpectedly 4-and-a-half
years later at the end of my parent’s marriage? Do I expose the patterns I
developed to cope with a life colored by my incomplete and flawed understanding
of family, relationships, the world in which we live or the heaven that our
souls bend toward?
Maybe I tell the stories of youth.
Being influenced and shaped by watching my brothers fail and succeed in
mischief and folly. Learning what not
to do but also emulating them in so many ways. Stories with BB guns, tree
forts, horses and goats, ATV’s, Kick the Can, mud, dirt, and frogs. Or growing
up in a town so small the population isn’t even posted and being blood related
to at least one person in half of the households within 2 square miles.
Maybe I share my songs and poems or
other artistic pursuits. The things that inspire me to create, to attempt ways
to say or show things that my soul feels but my mind is too naive or ignorant
to yet fully express. I find there is a constant struggle to keep myself in the
headspace of the creative. Pulling me from that place are the ever present
necessities of life; Family, the bills, job, friends, obligations and
expectations. There is an ever-present desire for integration. How do you
create a creative way of life? A way that attempts to ease the friction between
the id and needs of this physical world.
Maybe it’s a way to sort out all of
those things, to expose my ignorances and allow growth, to strive for growth. Like
so many, a way to expose myself in a public way that can help others see who I
am, and if we’re all lucky, who they are as well.
Parents! These most important
people in a person’s life. The source of their creation: The taking of this
gene and that trait and mixing them in the stew pot of life experiences and
making us human.
Maybe it’s nothing special. Cheap,
easily acquired ingredients cooked all together in the same pot. Their essences
intertwining and mixing. Coloring and flavoring each other, to become one
thing. But that one thing, that mixing of this from here and that from there; It’s
comfort. It’s familiar. It’s life. It’s love. It’s goulash for the soul.
Maybe it’s just about one thing that
my parents had in common.
