inheritance

From my father, I inherited his eating habits.  Chewing through one item on the plate at a time, finishing one before starting the next.  “Does your father still do that?” my mother’s mother says when she notices my actions. Smashing the baked potato out of its skin and turning it into mashed.  Why make a baked potato if you’re just going to mash it, smother it in butter? Because that’s how I learned to like it. An aggressive preference for Reese’s over any other candy bar, and the irritation when someone doesn’t pronounce its name right; “It’s a possessive,” I remind my boyfriend, exasperated, though I make it a rule not to correct people’s grammar. This is the exception.

From my father, I inherited his sense of humor, his taste in movies.  80s parody references before I knew what they meant; my mom watches a feel-good Hallmark movie about a woman who might be a witch (this is a good Christian channel, of course, so we can’t confirm or deny, but isn’t it spooky how she always seems to know how to fix this little town?) and every time we see a commercial my dad and I gleefully shout back and forth, “A witch!  A witch!”  Mom used to hate it when we’d watch Fear Factor, entranced and horrified by the absurd things people do for money.  I don’t remember the first time I watched Star Wars, but I do remember when I purposefully announced that I was going to the bathroom right before Indiana Jones got to the Holy Grail—I’m not scared of the guy turning to dust right in front of my eyes, Dad, I just have to pee—and similarly all the way into the dungeons until just before Harry Potter gets to the Sorcerer’s Stone, before I’d ever read the books.  

I also inherited his stoicism, his ability to at least appear unfazed.  Everything’s fine, if you’re asking, but I’ll make a joke about this thing that’s annoying the crap out of me, and I’ll talk animatedly about that until you forget about the vacant look in my eyes.

I inherited my mother’s love of reading, with too much zeal; even before my sister was born she had to limit me to twenty books from the library, and I picked all of them out myself.  I would’ve gone through more, but she needed a nice round number so she could make sure she’d retrieved them all from the crevices of my bedroom on our next trip. In fourth grade, she had to take my Harry Potter books away, because my homework wasn’t getting done.  In seventh grade, she had to do it again, because I wouldn’t read anything else. “Broaden your horizons,” she insisted, and I picked up Artemis Fowl instead. Escapist teenage action/adventure was my horizon.

I inherited my mother’s love of art, and belief in myself.  Childhood vacations were spent at museums and botanical gardens and historical sites.  When we finally made it to Italy, after twenty-two years of, “Next year,” she brought a binder of notes on Pompeii to the site, and pages of notes on the Uffizi, and Michelangelo, and the Duomo.  She was the artist in the house, and my dad was the engineer, yet she was the only one who suggested I get an engineering degree. It was always a half-hearted attempt, I think; she knew that I was always going into something artistic.  I pulled that stoicism again when I applied to college for writing, while all of my friends chose business and biology and international studies. It was 2012, and people thought the world was gonna end again, and four days later I laughed at Christmas, “No one’s getting jobs out of college anyway, so no degree is any worse than the others!”  My own personal brand of idealism, before I knew what my personal philosophy was; my mother and aunts think it’s pessimism, but they also walked out of Monthy Python’s The History of the World, so the nuance of absurdism is usually pretty lost on them. And yet when I graduated from college with my screenwriting degree I spent two months moping that I’d chosen the wrong industry, that entertainment was full of leeches, that I was going get chewed up and spat back out, with no career and much worse for wear.

I inherited my father’s light eyes, and my mother’s frizzy hair; I feel like everything I like about my appearance comes from him, and everything I can’t stand comes from her.

It didn’t help that I inherited my mother’s anxiety, after watching her struggle to drive, and spending years of therapy before she could get back on a highway; I’ve never seen my mom drive herself back to her childhood home, two hours away, because she might pass out on the way.  A chronic heart defect paired with severe generalized anxiety meant the furthest place I spent time before preschool was the local library. My dad drove us to church, and to Nonna’s, and on road trips to national parks and cousins’ houses and museums. It took years before I went to therapy, because I never wanted to be stuck in my house.  I still don’t. But the first panic attack I can remember came behind the counter at a Starbucks, and I just worked through it. Fight-or-flight ignores the least helpful response on a primitive survival scale, but the most helpful when the goal is to look like you’re sane at your customer service job—I just freeze. Later the flight response comes, as I’m driving home from work in the dark, a tiny voice somewhere in my stomach or my spine or the back of my throat growls, Just keep driving. My mother stopped driving, and I can barely will myself to get out of the car.