Fresh from America! Madame brought them!

StoryCorps happened, to my delight. I went on over to the Mobile Booth they had stationed in Millenium Park and, to the sounds of the jazz fest two greens over and the families out enjoying Labor Day weekend, I sat and waited my turn. A couple people wandered up to me and asked me about StoryCorps, mistaking me for an employee. Others asked where the bathroom was, mistaking me for a park ranger. Finally, Lady #1 emerged and asked me what story I would be telling that day.

Until that moment, I hadn’t fully decided. I figured they would want whatever I said to be as fresh as possible, anyway. I told her that I would be telling the story of how my parents met. I gestured vaguely. “And some other stuff.”

None of that other stuff would be new to readers of this blog, or anyone who’s had a serious conversation with me over the past year. As to the story of how my parents met, and the story of my French godfathers, which I launched into as well…those are best heard in person. Or you could listen to the recording of the entire interview they handed me on CD once I was done. I went home and uploaded it to iTunes and from there to Dropbox to share with whoever wanted to hear it. I was figuring my parents would want to hear it, and maybe a handful of interested family members. I knew which of my friends actively wanted to listen. I sent the link to some people and left it at that, figuring they’d listen to it when they could (probably while stuck in traffic or folding laundry or something).

Instead, I started getting, alternately, barrages of people wanted to listen to the interview and barrages of notes from people who had already listened to and enjoyed it. These notes ran the gamut from, “Awesome!” (much appreciated; that’s what I strive for) to “I love your StoryCorps recording! The stories you told obviously mean so much to you and are so beautiful, and your voice sounds so good telling stories (I would say you got your father’s gift :D)! I’m so glad it’s preserved to inspire others: your parents and the quality of the relationships in your family truly are moving.”

This is me, now, curled up, feeling the love.

It wasn’t that I expected no one to listen—that would be veering away from humility and into denial—but the volume and quality of the responses I got really moved me. From the girl I hadn’t talked to in a while who materialized out of nowhere and asked to listen, to the very close friend who intended to listen while she was doing something else and found herself glued to her computer, listening: these friends of mine rock.

There were others who, in really well thought out e-mails, informed me of my maturity. This meant a lot. It’s unpopular for someone my age to rhapsodize about her parents. It’s not that closeness with your parents isn’t valued in America, it’s more that it’s seen as a dangerous quality; possibly those who possess this quality are about to crawl back home, possibly they already live there, possibly they have no lives of their own.

None of those things are true of me, or of my best friend, who is also very close to her parents, or of the other people I know in this situation. “You should call home more,” is the punch line of many a joke, but it’s always the parent who utters it who is the butt of the joke, not the grown child off doing their own (presumably fulfilling, fascinating) thing. The assumption is that, as time passes, it is the parent’s place to sit by the phone and the child’s to craft their own life at the expense of the life they left behind.

In Europe, in China, in certain American cultures (although not the WASPy mainstream), living with your parents, or allowing your parents to live with you, is the norm. It doesn’t mean that you rely on them overmuch, that you haven’t cut the cord, or that you’re incapable of adulthood. It just means that for financial or health or other reasons you have chosen to support each other. That, after all, is what families are expected to do.

Let me be clear: I don’t advocate leeching off your parents. I don’t think parents exist solely to cater to their children’s needs. Nor to I think your parents should factor in every decision you make. We’re all people, and we can all live our own lives. I’m just saying that those lives don’t necessarily have to be lived completely separately in the service of some weirdly developed notion of the American Dream. I have no plans to move to my parents’ house in Kansas, but I don’t think I have to feel ashamed about wanting to talk about or be with the people who mean the most to me. Once upon a time, after all, someone referred to me as “your filial piety daughter.” I don’t think I’ve ever been more honored in my life.

So it was nice to feel the love on Facebook, in text messages, and via e-mail. And it was nice, in true Nom de Plume fashion, to share the experience with my parents, even though I was in one place and they were in another. Now, and for the foreseeable future, we and all the characters in our stories will get to hang out together in the Library of Congress. I’ll bring dinner, my godfathers can bring the wine, and my mom can bring her, ahem, American cake. My dad can provide the entertainment and sit there and tell stories to remind us how we all got there in the first place.