I have my father's eyes, yet have my mother's eyelashes.I have my father's smile, but have my mother's smirk. I have my mother's hands, but my father's fists.
I have my mother's taste in music, but my father's sense of song. I have my mom's love of reading, and my dad's love of cooking. I have my dad's social charms, but my mom's need for privacy.
I've my mom's sense of purpose and my dad's sense of style, but I have my own, unique sense of humor.
I have my dad's gift for gab with the ladies, my mom's ability to make friends quickly, but my own highly acute case of commitment-phobia.
What I don't have is either my mother's or father's lifetimes—their youths—in big families. I didn't have eleven siblings, like my dad, or seven siblings, like my mom. I only have one sibling, who I've seen three times in 15 years, and she lives less than two miles away from me.
I don't have the sense of family, the family my dad had with another woman and her son, and and the family my mom proactively avoided by taking jobs farther and farther away from her own kids.
For weeks—sometimes months—at a time, I did not have a mother or father to come home to, to have dinners with, to come watch me play sports or perform in school plays, to check my homework, or to show real interest in what was going on in my life beyond a ten minute phone call.
I did have a mother and father who came up with more reasons and excuses for not showing up at during Parent's Weekend at summer camp and coming to my award-winning short story reading.
I did have a mother and father who fought loudly over the phone over whose turn it was host their own children for a weekend, and not in our favor.
I do not have my mother's or father's ability to now be this close-knit family. I truly have the desire, but not the experience enough to know how.
But I have my father and mother's ability to try, though. Now, that I'm at the age my mother and father were when I first learned to not resent them, I have deep empathy, and, I can only hope, no residual bitterness.
I love my mother and father. Now more than ever, since I realize that I now, gratefully, have two things my mother and my father don't have.
I have my mother and I have my father.