Tail end of the party

My parents left for Iran yesterday. They go about once a year, which was always a weird thing when I was growing up. It was one of those inevitable and necessary things that had to happen, but it was always a bad time when one or the other parent had to be gone for an extended period. When my mom's parents were alive, she'd be gone for three-month chunks and I'd forget what she looked like and sounded like until I saw her in the airport again. I hated it when they left while I was growing up. In fact, I think I still hate it. Even though I don't live in the same American city with my parents, I still miss them when they go to Iran. What gets me more though is that I should have gone with them. I should have gone months ago. But my damn papers are still being processed and I'm still just waiting, and soon it will be busy season for me and I won't be able to take time off at all. In the meantime, spring and summer have come and gone, and we're mid-way through fall.

I was always jealous of other kids at graduations and Thanksgivings when their grandparents would come. I probably got to see my grandparents less than ten times in my lifetime because they lived halfway across the world. I used to worry who from my family would even come to my future-wedding since it was just my mom and dad. When I was ten years old, I decided that the solution to that problem would be to get married in Las Vegas. I think I saw a movie about it or something and found out that all you needed was a witness. I've always had a chip on my shoulder about people who got to see their extended family on a regular basis, especially the people who complained about it.

The past few weeks have been pretty normal. I could name all the art galleries and art shows and restaurants and bars I went to, but there's no point. I could talk about this Atlantic article which purports that all of us unmarried successful ladies out there have only "deadbeats" or "playboys" to choose from, but again: There's no point.

"What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation. But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with."

In fact, maybe I'm having an existential crisis. Maybe there were no points at all. And yet, I'm surprisingly... content. Isn't that all we wanted to begin with?