My Parents are Old !

My Parents are Old !

One thing that has always made me different from most of my peers is that I have parents who are old enough to be my grandparents. People are always understandably quite shocked when they first find out. Now that I am older, the age of my parents is not an issue for me. It is not something that I look at negatively or feel embarrassed about admitting. That wasn’t always the case when I was growing up, though.

I spent the first 18 years of my life pretending like my parents were just like those of my friends. I was already considered "different" enough by most of my peers; I didn’t need to add on another way in which I was just a little bit odd. When I was in elementary school and junior high I didn’t lie about my parents, but I didn’t freely offer up information about them either. I usually tried to avoid the subject at all costs. When I was in second or third grade, one of my classmates thought my mom was my grandma. I remember it being dark outside when this happened, so we must have been at school for our annual Christmas pageant. Since our school didn’t have too many extracurricular activities, that was the only time we were ever in the school after hours. I remember looking out the window of my classroom and seeing my mom approaching the school. She was coming to watch the Christmas pageant that would be starting shortly. My mom was great; she never missed a school event that involved me in any way. She even attended all of my parent-teacher conferences, except one when she had a hysterectomy. Anyway, one of my classmates had seen me with her before, so she knew that we were related. She saw my mom at the same time I did and said to me, "Oh, there’s your grandma." For whatever reason, I f...

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...certainly never deprived of love and attention. My brothers and sisters are all much older than I am, so I never had to share my parents with anyone. Spending so much time alone with them caused a bond to form between us that is different than the bonds between most parents and children. I feel privileged to have had my dad home with me when I was growing up, and I feel that we have a closer relationship because of that than we may otherwise have had. My older siblings always tell me, "The Dad you knew growing up is not the one we knew growing up." Sometimes I feel bad because I will probably be younger than most people generally are when my parents pass away, but I try not to feel that way. I may not have my parents for as large of a part of my life as I might like, but I know that I will never feel cheated because of the very special relationship I had with them.