Getting past the “norm”

I was brought up in an environment where normal was something you strove for. The father who worked; the mother who stayed home with the kids and volunteered time at the school PTA meetings; the house with the white picket fence and the 2.5 kids – well except for that as I grew up in a house where I was the oldest of four kids, but other than that, it was “so-called” normal. While we tried to maintain the “normal” status, behind closed doors it was more dysfunctional at best. Dysfunction threw me into a tailspin as a young adult. I struggled with the expectation that I was supposed to marry my high school sweetheart, have 2.5 kids, a house with a white picket fence, and be an at home mom. Instead my high school sweetheart left me as an unwed mother who worked outside the home and lived with my parents because my job didn’t afford a place of my own. I was not the “normal” child they had dreamed of – not by far. When I was 23 I met my husband. He wasn’t the “approved” model my mother and father had hoped for and vehemently told me not the marry him, but being the rebellious child I was, I did anyway. I ran away from the norm and ended up with a not so normal life. He wasn’t ideal for them, but he was ideal for me. He allowed me the freedom to explore things without a set of rules with which to apply them. He showed me how to break free from bonds that my mother still had over me – literally speaking she would withhold things from me like I was a child if I didn’t do what she said – like watching my son. He gave me so much that was not “normal”. Our roles in the household are not what my parents would consider normal. I work and my husband stays at home with the last of our five children. While he isn’t involved with the PTA, he oversees the homework aspect and the household duties. If anything, it is a bit of a reversal of roles. We have both struggled with finding placement in these roles because we were brought up with traditional expectations. Part of that struggle is an exploration of what seems to fit, what seems right. While we don’t have it down, we also have seen that we aren’t the only ones in this struggle of determining what are roles are. There are many families in which the traditional roles are reversed. There are other norms being broken as fathers are coming alongside mothers to do household chores as now they both work. I think struggle is a good word for transgenre, transgender, or anything that is not the norm. Struggle is something that comes from fighting against that which is common and comfortable, but struggle is what gets you to stretch and see what is possible. It’s an exploration, maybe to find what is you, maybe to find out what can be, maybe what is possible – maybe even that the next genre isn’t a genre at all but a freedom to do something without limitation. Writing is life and life is writing – that is sometimes how we find out what life is all about anyway.