One thing in common.

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.