Yin Y’all

They say opposites attract. I can’t attest to that through anything than my own experience, but I can say that the theory, at least in a broad sense, holds some validity. For instance, I’m caucasian, my wife isn’t. I’m Southern, my wife isn’t. I’m Country, she’s…………something. Undeniably, these aren’t exactly opposites but rather differences, so right away I’m off to a poor defense of my opening statement.

Let’s begin again. My wife, who happens to be Asian, is a girl’s girl. She loves manicures and pedicures and pampering and the city. She loves the hustle and bustle of it all, the constant movement and action, the nonstop entertainment and the social life that comes from being immersed in a major metropolitan area. She enjoys laying by a pool, shopping and eating out. She enjoys murder mysteries and true crime shows and autobiographies. Interior decorating and picking out furniture, even for other people, is one of her fortes. She loves spending hours cleaning and dressing my daughter up in dresses and tutus and tights and whatever else she can find so she can photograph her and then change her into the next ensemble.

She hates bugs, insects, creatures smaller than guinea pigs and anything associated with them. This also includes things without legs and, I think, things with legs that look like things without legs. She hasn’t been dirty since the catastrophe of 1995. Things out of place send her into a spiral of decluttering and organizing that can span days and entail the rest of the family being driven into indentured servitude until balance is restored in the universe.

For the sake of brevity, I am literally the opposite of all of this. .

I mention Asian, because culturally we are very different too. I preface this paragraph by stating that none of this is negative, it’s just different.

Gatherings are far more…….energetic shall we say. Everyone speaks at once, and they bounce back and forth between English and their native tongue, and at such a pace that once the party is over, I leave having no idea what anyone said or anything that was discussed. I may or may not have agreed to several things to which I am unaware.

Culinarily speaking, there is both similarity and vast differences. I’ve enjoyed too much of this difference, and I’ve found each time I try I enjoy it more.

Religiously we are quite different. Our methods of dealing with conflict, our mannerisms, even the tone of our voices are quite different. I’m quiet. She’s……………….not.

I’m Southern laid back and relaxed. It’ll get done. She’s Midwestern go-go-go, every issue must have an immediate solution.

So there’s our regional differences, me from the deep South, her from the Midwest. I won’t go into great detail as this is a blog, not a novel.

I won’t lie, it leads to a lot of compromising.

What from the outside might look like fertile ground for those disagreements is actually a rich environment for the little one. It just takes compromise and the desire to look more deeply into our situation, and as the world shrinks, a lot of situations.

There is a desire for us to think our respective cultures, ideals, beliefs are the correct ones. More than once I’ve had to make myself back and remove unthinking prejudices and give something a try with a fresh eye and experience it before casting judgement. And this cultural divide just doesn’t exist in marrying across racial or religious divides, it’s also regional. You’re literally melding two cultures into one in many cases.

But then, think of the bonuses.

She’ll get to sink her toes into the Georgia clay aside a creek and splash in the water amidst the skittering of water striders then retreat to a nice bath and manicure next to mom. She’ll get to eat lechón, and longganisa and follow it up with crawfish and some boiled peanuts. She can listen to her mother’s music (I used the term ‘music’ loosely, in this case) and then come to dad and enjoy the richness of his musical tastes.

My stepson, the master of accents, can leave a room rolling with his switch up of Filipino, Puerto Rican and Southern accents. He’s at home with shrimp and grits as he is with jibaritos.

And this experience has affected not just them, but me. Different means new. New means experience, and all these rich new experiences come so easily to our children, and the things we have to work at as adults, cast so hard into our molds we refuse sometimes to bend, are so natural to them that the divides that separate their mother and I aren’t really there at all, except in our heads.

And as with many posts, I didn’t start out to finish with some grand lesson, though I will admit my meandering and babbling gets me to places beyond my own grasp sometimes. I’m still mulling the lessons behind this one.

Sometimes we cling so fast to what we believe we are that we can’t become who we were meant to be. Our children’s amalgamation of our disparate cultures, rites, and myriad differences into a whole is seamless and easy. It’s natural. They aren’t beholden to those self imposed limits. This bears further research.

In in digesting the subject matter of this post I’ve come once again to the conclusion that I’ve oft stated in conversation and writing.

I have much to learn from my children.