MY LIFE

My parents grew up in strict households. Their parents, both sets having been born into an era of having to work hard to succeed and believing in the importance of social status and conformity to get ahead in the world, held their children up to high standards. Encouragement was rare, criticism was considered an expression of love and support, and breaking any rules set by their social circles was seriously frowned upon.

My parents were young, naive, and still in college when they decided to rebel. They did what college kids do: challenged their parents' belief systems, made friends with people who widened their views of the world, did things they weren't allowed to do at home, and dated whomever they felt like. They met during a social event and began a romance meant to expand their horizons. The expansion changed their lives forever.

Before they graduated, they learned about me. My mother was one year away from graduation; my father was only two years in. At the time, they didn't know they were trendsetters — it was the decade of the puritanical 1950s, after all — so they panicked a little. They decided to quit school to get married, find jobs, and raise their new family the way they were taught to do: the respectable way. Never having lived without the guidance of their own parents, I don't believe they were ready for the responsibility.

From the moment I was discovered in utero, I was bombarded with doubt, fear, regret, and uncertainty. I carried the weight of that unplanned pregnancy for decades, unknowingly shouldering the responsibility for bringing our family together so fast and furiously. My mother was married and had three kids before she was twenty-five; my father was a year younger than her. In my mind, they were still kids themselves and could've used a few more years to mature into family life. It's no wonder I thought being born into this world was a bad idea and looking forward to a long life was next to impossible. Even though my parents loved me and thought they were ready for me, I arrived as a cute, cuddly, forever burden to a couple of overwhelmed, deeply worried college students.

They worked very hard after my birth to provide for my future unplanned brothers and me. My parents did without so we could eat decent meals and stay warm in the winter. They relied on friends and family to help raise us and watch over us as they each took any job that would bring in an income. They practiced the parenting skills their own parents had ingrained in them, had to stop thinking of themselves, never got enough sleep, and worried constantly about our future.

The exhaustion of parenthood morphed my parents' love story from excitement and strong attraction into a struggle of surviving a difficult life. They both felt unappreciated by us kids and each other and fought to keep their love for each other alive. As the years progressed, my mother and father recognized how unhappy they actually were and took their frustrations out on each other, engaging in battles that tore each other down instead of lifting them up. It never occurred to them that they were carrying on in their parents' footsteps. Criticism was still an expression of love, rules were rules, and social conformity was necessary to succeed. Eventually, they both lost sight of their strengths and talents, and they didn't know how to express their true value to each other.

Though separation was tempting and divorce was an easy solution to their predicament, they stayed together because, in their eyes, the rocky marriage was a commitment built on raising a family that they took very seriously.

Their love for their family keeps us all together to this day.

While I was growing up, from childhood to my early twenties, those years that were supposed to be my best and easiest, I'd wake up most mornings and wonder why it was so hard to look forward to living through the day. "Why," I asked myself, "do we force ourselves to wake up with an alarm to do something we really don't want to do all day, just because someone said we had to do it?" I felt ancient and tired and couldn't wait to grow up and get my life over with. I wasn't hoping to end my life early; I just wanted to live it as quickly and easily as I could, do what needed to be done, and move on.

For years, I found myself lying in bed after waking and willing myself to get up, eat breakfast, go to school or work to make a living, come home to do homework or clean the house, make dinner, prepare for the next day, and go back to bed, exhausted and unfulfilled, every single day. I found myself wondering, Do I really have to do this for the next sixty or seventy years? Did I really want to do it? If my parents were that unhappy with life, what did I have to look forward to?

You couldn't convince me even on my best days that it was good to be alive.

But I did it. I powered on, hoping I'd figure out the whys some day. My basic instinctual inner child kept whispering in my inner adult ear that it was important for me to figure it out. I learned to depend on my will to live and my intuition to get me through my days, weeks, and years. For some weird reason, I did have a strong will to live and a strong sense of curiosity about where my efforts would lead me. "Living may be hard," I kept telling myself, "but there must be a reason for it." My life was a mystery novel, a puzzle I was determined to solve.

I wanted to see what my future would be, and since I wasn't a fortuneteller, I had to live long enough to experience it. The funny thing about the future is that you never actually get there. Your future becomes the present and tomorrow becomes your future. It's a never-ending circle of living you have to do, for some reason, that gets you through your life. I depended on my curiosity to keep me going. It became my main life goal to discover why I did what I did when I did it, whatever it was, to solve the puzzle of my life. I was determined to see if all of my efforts would lead to something important enough to make life worth living through it.

I had parents who tried very hard to be good parents, brothers who found ways to make life an adventure, loving relatives, and a good education. I lived in homes with central air conditioning and plumbing and had access to anything I needed. Anyone would look at my life and call it fulfilling, but I took life so seriously that I couldn't enjoy it. When I was a kid, playing games seemed idiotic, and I spent the beginning of my adult years trying to understand lighthearted people. I felt like a stranger in a strange, incomprehensible world. The only emotions I could relate to were anger and frustration. Getting close enough to people to call them friends seemed impossible. I realized at a very young age that I really didn't like people that...