Parents say the darndest things

I noticed, lately, that I tell people stories about my parents. I quote them in a funny anecdote the way other people do their children. I'll be doing it and then suddenly become very self-conscious and wonder, is this normal? Do other people do this? I don't think they do. Which brings me to my next question, why am I?

It's possible that I have tired of talking about myself, and am looking for something, I don't know, more removed to talk about. Everyone has parents so it could be that I'm seeking to strike a common chord. Again, much the way people with children do. Many of the people I know, in fact most, still don't have children and yet I don't notice them telling stories about their parents.

There's the obvious reason that they live close to me and I see them often. Another possible explanation is that until the last few years, I haven't been as emotionally connected to my parents as I am now. In fact, I might be going through some reverse process by which I become more attached to my parents as I get older, where other people become less. I also feel that I'm just getting to know them.

When we're kids, our parents intentionally keep certain things from us that reveal that they are human, they make mistakes and they were once children too. As they get older, my folks offer up these delicious little tidbits of their life. Just today, I was having lunch with my mom. She saw a girl and said "she's wearing bloomers." I looked and sure enough, she was. I don't think I've ever seen a person wearing bloomers in real life before - I mean, not in a costume. Then she said that she was wearing bloomers when she met my dad. Black bloomers with white polka dots and a baby doll type top.

"My hair was cut short", she said, "like yours." And then she told me a piece of the "how I met your father story" that I'd never heard before. It was really nice. Sometimes telling the stories are a way of sharing my own opinion, but from someone else's mouth. You see, I hear myself in them, and it amazes me that we are so similar.

My mom was talking about a new HBO show, I think that one about sex. She said "What's the fascination with bodies anyway? We all have one." I just about fell off my chair laughing and I'm not even sure it's that funny. It's that the thought seems so unique to me that hearing it from her mouth reminds me that we are related. That I made from her the way Eve is supposed to be made from Adam.

I spent quite a few years of my life not liking my parents very much, so it's an absolute treat to get to know them at this point in my life. While out to dinner with my dad, he was asking about my recent (and second) conversion to vegetarianism. "Is it for your health or because you want to save the animals?" he asked. I replied that it was for the animals and he laughed before he could stop himself. But I understood, I knew what it meant.

He was thinking that it can't possibly make a difference if I stop eating animals when he's going to have a bowl of sea creatures for dinner. But he's a smart man, and he knows I'm a smart woman so he gives it another think. I tell him that I have certain beliefs and things that are important to me and that at some point in a discussion about these things, someone will inevitably ask if I am vegetarian and I will have to be able to say "yes." He listened then said "In Peru, people throw trash out the car window." He told them that it was bad, that they shouldn't do it and they asked "why?" They looked at him with quizzical faces. That's what people do. He said that even though he couldn't change their mind, he thought it was important to be an example. He made the connection between my example, showing people that we can change, bringing awareness with my choices, and his own experience. I was really quite proud of him.

I think in a way, I'm kind of falling in love with my parents the way people do with their children. For me, I've found that it's a way of accepting myself. I am, after all, like them in so many ways. For me to love their quirks is to come to love mine.