I’ve got a lot of growing up to do.
When I was younger, I always wanted to move away from home. I would tell my parents stuff like, “oh, there’s no point to installing permanent bookshelves in my bedroom, I’m moving out soon, and I’d rather take the shelves with me.” I was 12 when I said this. As soon as I was a teenager, I knew I planned to leave my parents and family behind to find a “bigger and better” life beyond the Idaho potato fields I grew up in. (Note: In reality, I lived much closer to a cemetery than a potato field, but folks tend to believe Idaho is wall to wall with potatoes.) (Secondary note: Potato fields are actually found in the ground, not on walls, and sometimes, when I was younger, my father would tell me my ears were so dirty potato fields were starting to appear there too.) So, I said, “I’m 15 guys. This means that I am only one year until I need to be planning for college and then one year until my senior year and then the next year I’m moving away. I should basically start packing now.” My mother never said anything, but she would smile and nod, which I’ve realized has come to be her signature expression. Always the peacekeeper that she is, she didn’t want to think that I may leave soon but also didn’t want to crush my dreams. Inevitably, the time did come for me to move away from home and I’ve had quite the life since then. I’ve felt so grown for so long, that now, at 22, I feel so unprepared for what’s to come. A LITTLE BACKGROUND Honestly, I’ve been through all sorts of phases to get to the position I’m in today. During my prepubescent years I had an intense obsession with Care Bears, those Hallmark greeting-card plushies with their own sitcom and unique belly badges. When I was in my formative teenage years, I took a deep dive into the whole vampire-romance genre, as much as I wish I could forget it. And now, as an adult, I have a huge obsession with going to the movies to see muscular superheroes in colorful tight outfits. These phases have defined me and I’ve been able to recall my life in various ways because of them. I can track myself through pop culture. I can talk about how I was a different person each school year I attended. Or I can separate my experience based on who I dated and how long I was with them. I can even tell you where I was in my life for each Lady Gaga album release. My corner of Idaho has a population of 11,000 people. My parents didn’t finish High School and my father has worked as a laborer all his life. I was encouraged to go to college and my parents have helped me out every step of the way, even when they didn’t what or where the steps were. My senior year left me in a hurry to leave home. I worried that if I graduated on Friday and I wasn’t packed and ready to leave by Saturday, my future would escape me. I worried that I would be stuck in a Christian home, which in hindsight was both loving and supportive, and I would end up working at Taco Bell until I was 50. (Which isn’t a problem if you enjoy middle-aged white women screaming about their Nacho Bell Grande being Fresco-style.) I wanted out. My defining feature from the age of 16 to 18 was really “get me out of here, my hormones are out of balance” and looking back I probably squandered away a lot of opportunities for friends because I was so focused with what comes next rather than that spectacular now. I was an over-achiever. Probably because I had an impossible goal to obtain and a fear of the unobtainable. THE PLACE WHERE THE SAGEBRUSH GROWS I had a relative ask me what an “Aggie” is and I told them, “I don’t know, but their mascot is a big blue bull, so that’s a thing.” And that summer I went off to college. I wasn’t the type of person who believed I was ever going back home. I moved everything from my bedroom in Idaho to my new apartment. When people went home for the summer, I stayed. My parents helped me with this change and even stayed the night with me, my first night alone in a new place, when they saw that I was more scared than I thought. Recently I graduated from the college in this “small town” of almost 52,000 people. The last four years had some amazing highs and incredible, painful lows. By the time graduation came around, many of the locations in the city caused me a lot of heartache and regret. This was a major factor in the decision to uproot my life once again. All the way up to last week I believed that I had a pretty good handle on life. I mean, I have a degree, I am no longer 15, I’m a man who can do anything and the world is for the taking, right? THE WOMAN AT THE DESSERTS BUFFET Then last night I cried. I just moved to a town with the population of almost 118,000 people, and there are multiple big cities around it with just as much or twice as many people. (I’m working my way up to a city the size of Los Angeles.) The last week I have felt confident that this change was going to be a great thing, only having three specific concerns that aren’t even important to write here, and it felt like the “grown up,” college degree-having decision that I should make. I mean, “there are so many career opportunities here” I told myself, and I made a goal never to work fast food or retail again. This weekend, now on day three, I have been lucky enough to have my parents’ help once again with moving furniture, assembling shelves, laughing together and going to the local buffet to celebrate a job well done. (This is an Idaho-Mormon’s version of going out to the bar, and if there are funeral potatoes, you know it’s going to be lit.) At the buffet a ginger-haired lady of about five-foot-one and easily in here golden years was loading up a plate, usually reserved for entrée items because it is twice the size of the others, with desserts of all kinds. I watched as she placed two cookies, a slice of carrot cake, a brownie, a spoonful of apple crisp and some banana pudding to her pile. She saw me waiting behind her to grab my own sweets and she smiled at me. “Life’s for eating sugar and spending time with family,” she laughed. “Definitely,” I said, which is my go-to response when I haven’t processed what someone has said but I want them to know I was listening. I sat back down with my confections at the booth that was too small for my belly with the parents I had been so anxious to leave just four years ago. My mother made a comment about there being pineapple at the salad bar and my father said his chicken was too pink. This woman at the buffet had wigged me out and suddenly I was a little more sentimental than I had been the days before. This new home, a new phase beyond Care Bears or college, was going to take me even farther from that family, and today, it just doesn’t seem worth it. GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO You couldn’t have told me when I was racing to get entertainment magazines from the mailbox that my career wasn’t as important as I thought. You couldn’t have told me on my wedding day that my family was always going to be there for me. I wouldn’t have listened if someone had said that there might be a time that I would consider moving back to Idaho. The thing is, whenever I talked about wanting to be a writer, my parents supported me. Even though they didn’t attend my wedding, when the ovens at the venue didn’t work, my parents cooked the food at their home. At every new phase of my life, my parents have never let me go at it alone. Whether it is just advice or a listening ear, help moving or celebrating achievements, or even slipping me a twenty-dollar bill for gas money when I hadn’t asked, they have had my back. This makes me so nostalgic and homesick that I can’t even function. I spent a lot of time trying to get away, because my parents were different people then. We have both been through so much in the last four years and have been changed for the better. Now, I want to spend more time with this version of them. I regret not being closer and visiting more often. “Life’s for eating sugar and spending time with family,” I think to myself as I write these words. My apartment is unpacked. There’s a new city to explore. I think about funeral potatoes. Any day could be our last, so we should treasure the moments we have. I’ve grown a lot and will grow some more. With all these growing pains, I will never be grown enough not to miss my family. I have a year of unknown waiting ahead. [email protected] @GrahamWoodMedia
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Erick L. Graham Wood
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