Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I have had a rather difficult relationship with the man I call Albert, who also happens to be my father. We not only share the same birthday, we also share some other similarities and some of them are not too endearing. I look exactly like him. There's no doubting that I am his daughter. No wondering if my mother was having an affair with the milkman unless the milkman was a doppelganger for my father. I inherited my bold sense of humor from that man. As well as my unforgettable laugh. I'm fairly confident, though, that it's from Albert that I also inherited my manic tendencies and my other brain disorders. He'll hate me for saying that, as he believes his brain is perfect. No one, actually, is more perfect than Albert, according to him.
I believe I started calling him Albert when I was about four or five years old, I'm not exactly sure? I remember we were spending the summer at a cottage on Cape Cod and all my cousins and relatives were calling him Albert and so it just made sense that I should call him that, too. The adults all thought it was cute and funny at the time, but I never called him anything except Albert after that summer.
I am the son that my father never had. I have spent my entire life, truly, attempting to fill some sort of unshared plan that he had for me, something I'm sure was half made up in my own head, trying desperately to do everything absolutely perfectly so that he would love me. I think that I can honestly count on just one hand the times my father has told me that he was proud of me or that I've done a good job or that he loved me. If I got an A, it was always a question of why I hadn't gotten an A+? If I won all the blue ribbons at the horse show, it was a question of how many points I was still behind on the year-end Championship awards. I won't even bother with all the unsung and unnoticed things I achieved in my effort to please him.
Eventually, as many do in this situation, I had a nervous breakdown. And when I recovered, I realized that if I was going to actually live and breathe and walk on this planet, I had to do so on my own terms. Not Albert's. This meant, first and foremost, that I needed to figure out who I was and what it was I wanted in my life. I had spent so much of my life living it to please him, I honestly had no idea what it would mean to just be me. Thus, I spent the time in London, writing and going to all plays possible and coming to terms with myself as a creative person, not as a person bound for law school.
Of course I've spent the last twenty-five years chasing my creative dreams. I really have done just what I've wanted to do at every turn and I have no regrets. There were some very difficult and "come to Jesus" moments with Albert along the way, as he fought with me about the very me that I was finding and embracing, but I absolutely refused to let her go.
So it is kind of a shock to me that I have been spending the last month or so investigating not only law schools, but the application process too. There is nothing more in this world that Albert wants for me, or has ever wanted for me, than for me to be a lawyer. It is precisely because it has been his dream that I have walked in exactly the opposite direction for the last twenty-five years.
I know in my heart I would be a very good lawyer. The more I think about our environment, our planet, our food sources, our own health, the more I realize that while I know I can make a difference with just my voice and my willingness to stand up and shout, I also know there are important ways I can make a bigger difference.
Of course I am only pondering all of this. Just pondering. Doing a little investigative research. Seeing what it tells my heart as well as my head. However, when Albert reads this? I hope the defibrillator is nearby and ready. Because for all of our differences, I don't want to be the one to have killed him with a heart attack.
