Before my voyage to San Antonio I liked to complain about how I was not looking forward to visiting while in the back of my mind, I was actually quite elated. I would complain to friends and passersby of the warm winter and obligatory family functions, but I was secretly anticipating both.
So when I touched down in San Antonio, in the balmy 65 degree weather, I had a facade of ambivalence but in my heart, feelings of warmth waiting to burst forth. In my 24 years of life, everytime I came home for the holidays I always felt like a child -- to be coddled and catered upon. For the very first time, I felt as if I were an adult, coming home to a life that seemed so long ago. The environment had changed little, imperceptibly so. The sights, sounds and smells all rang familiar. Time seems to have soldiered on with the only hint of evolution being the massive highway system that seemed to have been erected in, well, no time at all.
As the days went on, however, I realized that there have been small bits and pieces that were different, but not in the fast-food landscape (the Whataburger still stood proudly on DeZavala and I-10), but within my own mindset.
When I came home I, due to woeful negligence, had forgotten pajamas to sleep in and I had no back up. While riffling through the discounted novelty t-shirts at Walmart I realized that this had never happened to me before. Unfortunately, when transplanting my life 3,000 miles away I had forgotten to leave a sliver in San Antonio in case I needed it.
While growing up, I had always thought my family was excepted from bad circumstances. Sure my mother suffered from some medical issues but we would always make it through. My dad, though flawed, would always have the uncanny ability to fix a problem (or at least take it off my hands). Money, while an object of contention as to whose hands it should be in, was never a problem to procure. This time, however, I saw that all the exceptions I perceived were not there. My family was just as ordinary as anyone else's.
As I ponder the lives that have developed from the Lim household I wonder if they are what my parents expected when they started a family some thirty years ago. I can still remember being seven years old, the age of the students I teach, and not knowing or even thinking about my life twenty years later.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an adult. Does it mean coming 'home' and realizing you don't have a spare set of clothes to change into? Is it noticing the scraggly gray hair that wasn't there last year? For me, it's something far less tangible. It's a switch that remained dormant for so long that, when it was finally clicked, caught me off guard. In many ways, I still feel as though I'm a child, kicking and screaming as I'm dragged into the world of grown-ups, but I know that it's inevitable no matter how hard you try to put it off.
