Easy

Sometimes, when the drama increases to new heights, when I'm terrified about leaving home, when my parents think I've giving them a lot of attitude, my dad will invoke the 'easy' reminder. I have it so easy, I'm so lucky. I was born in America. I'm getting an education. I'm going to college, and we'll figure out a way to pay for me and both of my brothers to go. I can drive, I wasn't born in a country that does not allow women to drive or be educated. I can walk down the street in whatever I want to (and my parents let me) wear. There's the option of birth control readily available and widespread. (And the whisper in the back of my mind says that there's always the option of abortion at the worst.) I wasn't married off at the age of thirteen. I'll be able to vote and have a say in our country. I'm intelligent and healthy, and I can keep that up. I was taken around the world to see people and understand that they are all intrinsically the same, all intrinsically good, kind, intelligent people, more than the majority of my peers have ever seen. In short, I was born in one of the most privileged places in the world to a family that will aid in my success. He doesn't say most of this, but I know. That's what he means, after all, when he says I was born here.

Then comes the comparisons. "When they were your age," he says, then launches into descriptions of how I have it so easy. My mother was in college, trying to figure out how to pay for it all herself, had twice as many classes as required for a full-time student, and worked a job pretty much full time. My dad was caring for his father, who was slowly dying, and had already lost his mother over a decade before. My maternal grandfather was in college for engineering, gearing up for World War Two. My maternal grandmother was emigrating to a land where she knew no-one but an uncle, lost, and had to get married in order to make sure she could support herself. My paternal grandfather was in the Navy or nearly so, having run away from home to join the Navy in time for World War Two. (I'm still not sure if he knew how to swim, but he joined anyways and ended up on a submarine.) My paternal grandmother survived the London Blitz, biking past the river and nearly getting hit. I have it easy.

Looking back, I feel like a wimp. I have it so easy, grew up so soft. My grandfather and his father were farmers, working the land themselves. I've never known labor like that. I have to live up to these examples - and there's more than that, there's their friends, more ancestors, stories we hear in the news. People who find adversity, trample it, and laugh in its face. People who can be proud of themselves, their accomplishments. Why can't I have it hard?