Meet the Parents

Saturday was my Dad's birthday. My parents invited Wifey and I over for a cookout and some of Dad's splendid homemade banana pudding, but considering that my brother would be there and that we already had plans for Saturday, I declined that invitation. Instead I offered to take my parents out to dinner on Friday, and low and behold, they accepted! I suppose we acutally are making progress in this arena. This is a huge relief to me. It was just last month that they declined my invites to get togethe on my mom's birthday and Mother's Day citing church events as their outs. Happy to have a date with my parents, Wifey and I met them at the restaurant of their choice, which oddly enough was a Mexican restaurant (I mean, mom can make that at home better than any local place, right?) but hey, it's your day, Dad, so whatevs! It was a little more relaxed than previous visits with them have been since our reunion. For you new readers,( or those, like me, who forget things) my family and I are just now beginning to rekindle our relationship, after a nearly 6 year hiatus, in which there was no contact at all. It's been painstakingly slow and somewhat slippery to navigate this path of finding a happy medium with my family. I say my family, but I only mean a small section of it. My parents. I learned more about my father this past Friday night, which in turn taught me more about me. I found out that my OCD like behavior of counting how many words were just spoken in the last sentence, how many letters in that word, how many syllables...probably came from him. I found out that my high school algebra experience of being completely unable to grasp the concept and unable to transfer out of the class mirrored his experience. The only difference was he received zeros because he simply turned in papers with his name on them and my teacher was kind enough to give me 50s for at least placing an answer on the paper. My papers were usually turned in with all of my answers being x = 3.14 just because I was particularly fond of the way pi looked, and enjoyed drawing it. It really wasn't until college that my dad, who is now an engineer, picked up his mad math skills, and likewise, for me. I suppose you have to be in the right mindset, and have the right kind of teacher teaching in the right way to learn something like algebra and trigonometry. Once it clicked,though, it clicked. We attributed our math skills to all of our practice at counting everything in our heads all of the time. The old apple really doesn't fall so far from the tree, does it? Scary. After dinner, once we were in the safety of our car, Wifey said to me, "Honey, your dad's leg was bouncing as fast as yours does! And he was fidgeting with his napkin worse than you do! You guys have some serious anxiety issues."
I laughed. Not a full hearted, ha ha that's funny laugh, but a nervous, Yeah, I know what you mean, kind of laugh. Wifey has such clear perspective sometimes, it's frightening.