Adult

I sit in anticipation for the succulent food that has become so rare since college hit. No need to worry about price either, this is his treat. Steaks, scallops, fancy mushrooms, the array of appetizers that he always makes sure we order - just to get a taste of as much as we can. I look across the table at the man who has given me an abundance of his habits, quirks, and personality. I arrange my skewed silverware so that it is perfectly in place and in accordance with my spurts of OCD. He has done the same. I bite the inside of my mouth in thought as I scan the menu and look up to see that he is doing the same. With each birthday I see more and more of my dad in every decision I make, every type A habit that plagues my nerves. Tonight, as we sit down to catch up over a nice dinner, I feel a change, a shift in our relationship. He always treated me as an equal, whether I was seven years old and evaluating his current girlfriend or eighteen, a partner in his business plans to invest in movies. But tonight, I am an adult. 

College seems to have that affect on children. We are thrown to the dogs, where no one seems to care if anything is fair anymore and battered bones leave bruises that brand us “experienced” or “aware.” At the end of this four years, we come upon the precipice of deciding our fate, or at least our next responsible step, so it is assumed that we can take on more truth. We have seen bits of the world. We have seen bits of the ugly. We have been forced to break it down and analyze it in fluorescent lit classrooms. So my dad brings up my mom. Asks me my opinion and what I’ve come to think of the decisions they made. 

While I’ve talked to my parents about each other numerous times over the years (inescapable for an only child of divorce) I’ve never crept out of the playpen enough to truly look at what happened between them and why. I’ve never looked at them as two individual adults that loved and lost and hurt each other. Divorce was a childhood label that explained why I carried a bag back and forth to school on switch days. I didn’t need more than that because I was happy with both of them, and both of them were happy apart. But I am not five, ten, sixteen anymore. Even worse, I feel much too beyond my years. Now my heart has been broken, my trust has been raped, my high expectations have been ridiculed and rendered impossible all within four years of emerging into adulthood. My understanding of all of this is much more full than when I was fourteen, so when my dad asks me about his choices, I know that I can respond. I have a responsibility to respond because he wants to know. He sees that those adult scars already tell my stories. 

So I look into the same blue eyes as my own and I tell him.   


-Bri