Yesterday marked the third weekend in a series of weekends where I've been over to see my parents. Once was for their wedding anniversary, the other was because Sam and I went hiking by their house. Yesterday was because we had to borrow their van, and this coming weekend, I will be back there for our Chinese New Year dinner.
Lately, I feel like I've seen my parents more than anyone else outside of Sam. And while I've enjoyed seeing them with this frequency, I can't help but remember that it hasn't always been this way. There was a time, not too long ago, when the idea of "home" was confining, when my mother was overprotective, and being at home meant to exist in a vacuum: either be at home and be only "Bao Bao," my nickname from when I was a baby, or be away from home and be Austin and be all the rest of me, the me that emerged since growing up.
The dichotomy started when I was a teenager. I remember one afternoon when I came home later than they had expected, out amongst friends they were uncomfortable with, I told them that I felt like walking through the front door of the house was akin to stepping into my cell block and hearing the door slam shut. I felt trapped by their presence and demands and looked forward to when I could be free to live my own life. This conversation haunted them for a long time. And me, though much later.
As an adult a few years ago, when I was living my own life, "home" became a division, one compartment that shared no adjacency with others. When I came home, I was sterilized of all partners, all friends, all interests in anything that would betray a sexuality of any kind. When I came home, I had to abandon my other life, choose between my partner or my parents. Where once I looked forward to Thanksgivings, birthdays, I grew to dread them, found the planning and delegation of time to be more stress than it was worth. Do I spend all Christmas Eve with my parents, then leave to be with Scott? Should I celebrate my birthday one week early at my parents' house so I can spend the actual with Eddie? There never seemed to be the right answer, and slowly, I resigned to the inevitable, that ne'er the twain would meet. I watched our relationship become a delicate bubble, one touch from collapsing.
I am 30 now, and things are much different. I am still living my own life, as I had wanted years ago, but now I want my mom and dad to be a part of it. I think they want to be a part of it, too. It took them a long time to learn how to accept the look and shape of my family, which bore little resemblance to theirs. After the Detente, things have changed so much. Same mom and dad, same me, but now with space to include a host of other players: friends, lovers, those we once sequestered from each other for fear of disrupting the delicate relationship we had.
I guess it's true what they say, that you can never go home again. Even though my room there is as it ever was, complete with books from high school still on the shelves, a signed poster by the San Francisco cast of Phantom of the Opera falling out of its $2 frame on the wall, it is as if I had never left. Even the rest of their house, with the blue velvet couches in the living room, the ceramic figurines of various Chinese zodiac animals sitting in the foyer, nothing has changed much from how the house looked in 1998. But it is so different. When I go back there, it is of my own free will, and I leave there looking forward to the next time I will be back. Where it once was a prison now seems like a sanctuary; where once my parents seemed like wardens, I am no longer a prisoner.
I think the major turning point in my perceptions of "going home" came when I realized that one of the greatest tragedies of parenthood, of people who wanted nothing more than to be parents, is that if you raise the child right, they will always leave you. They will need to leave, venture out, live, and start families of their own. I don't remember how I came to this epiphany, but when I did, I regretted how as a teenager, I could so easily have made my parents feel like I never wanted to be there in the first place.
And now, I look for excuses to go back and see them. I am lucky to have a partner who seems to understands this and gets how important they are in my life. Slowly, though it feels sudden, two areas of my life that once were worlds apart have bridged.
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