The Anthropologist in the Family
How NOT Being Like My Parents Has Led to a Regret-Free Life
After seeing a twenty-foot Christ while on LSD, my father converted from Judaism to Christianity as part of the Jesus revolution happening on Haight-Ashberry in the seventies. He went to a Bible conference and while being filled with the Holy Spirit and dancing; met a woman whose kiss was “electric with demonic energy.” Friends, he married her.
I was the third of four children that resulted from their union. When I became self-aware, I knew I just wanted to be elsewhere. I felt like an alien in my family of origin—Superman to a chaotic Ma and Pa Kent, Spock to Captain Kirk. Sometimes there was no food at home, sometimes physical abuse. The green pools of The Magician’s Nephew were infinitely preferable to our house with unresolved tension and roaches.
I looked at my parents with curiosity, like an anthropologist. This is how you destroy a marriage: see her berating and complaining, see him sitting in his bathrobe reading the Bible and not helping around the house or getting a job, see them both going three times a week to church— putting on a face of peace and tranquility when the whole drive there, they’d been arguing. See them using their children as pawns for control in their frequent separations. I knew what I did not want.
When we were not listening to Amy Grant or Sandi Patti, my parents argued—why Mom wouldn’t turn her checks over to my dad like a good, submissive wife—why Dad wouldn’t work and support the family.
We visited my grandparents twice a year. We piled into the rusted-out, wood-sided station wagon and headed from Indiana to Maryland. When we were not listening to Amy Grant or Sandi Patti, my parents argued—why Mom wouldn’t turn her checks over to my dad like a good, submissive wife—why Dad wouldn’t work and support the family. “Blessed are the poor” meant to him that we weren’t supposed to worry about money, and he didn’t. When we ran out of gas on the freeway, “God will provide” meant that we were stuck in the bitter Indiana cold. I don’t know how much the grandparents knew about what went on, and I don’t know if they would have stepped in if they did.
They led a different life—one of order, one of relative ease, where they never said there wasn’t enough money. My grandparents weren’t wealthy, but they took us to the ballet and to Chinese food, and they were truly interested in what we had to say.
I was an anthropologist there, too. See them kvetching at each other. “Sylvia, how many times have I told you? You do not stack the tea cups!” See the ways their eyes brighten when they look at each other. See the flowers (iris are her favorite) he brings home every Friday after volunteering for Legal Aid. Every morning at five in the morning, Grandpa called down to us grandkids, “Would anyone like to go on a constitutional?” I alone would clamber up the turquoise-carpeted staircase and we would go walking. Even with his frozen hip from polio and his cane, he clicked along faster than I could run. The deep red Maryland mud squelched beneath my sneakers, the cherry blossom petals coated the ground. He talked of not having two pennies to scrape together when he came to DC, of how Grandma lit up the stage in the plays that he wrote— how he always wanted to be an English teacher but he couldn’t pass the “OR-als”with his Brooklyn accent. I could always tell it hurt him, to be so passed over. He never talked about his work, a government job that had something to do with taxes. He hated it, but it provided a steady income for his family and a pension.
He talked of my father with barely veiled disdain. I kept quiet. I was awed by my grandfather, a force of nature that bent his life to his will, that did not understand how my father could not follow in his footsteps. Grandpa could not understand the appeal of evangelical Christianity, when he was an atheist and a Jew.
My brothers and sister asked, “Why do they have so much, and we have so little? Maybe it was just so out of their paradigm that they could not fathom it. Even still, I took their lessons, their lives, to heart. I have been married to my husband in San Diego for twenty years. Every time we argue, I think, “divorce the bastard.” It’s the way I’m wired. Then I think, “Is this what my mother would do?” Yes. She was married four times, once before my father, twice after. I don’t do it. I stay put.
I am truly blessed, yes, but in addition to that, I have engineered my life to be as much as possible without drama. That doesn’t mean that drama never comes; I still have my family of origin to contend with.
I have a stable home, a stable life. I have oatmeal every morning. I have a husband who is my biggest groupie, a sweetheart son. I am truly blessed, yes, but in addition to that, I have engineered my life to be as much as possible without drama. That doesn’t mean that drama never comes; I still have my family of origin to contend with, and plenty of challenges come my way. I have gone to years of therapy and have learned that wherever you go, there you are; I have learned boundaries and not to make snap judgments fueled by anger. My boy grew up in this house and attended two schools, rather than my eight. My husband makes pancakes every Saturday. We have a routine. I am content, even happy at times. I chose and choose every day to deviate from my parent’s path.
About the Writer
Anna Abraham Gasaway (She/Her) is an emerging, disabled writer that has been