Yes, I know, I have been reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac for an unreasonably long period of time, but last night I finally finished it. Though the going was tough at times, I feel that I accomplished something in getting through this work, and I feel that I have been a given a lot to think about because of this novel.
For example:
"Dean took other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. Pitiful forms of ignorance."
This passage really led me to start thinking about my own life. What are my children going to think of me and my past? (Albeit this novel was written well before the "I'm-drunk-and-at-a-bar-take-my-picture" days of the 21st Century, so Kerouac had no worries there.) Will I have the dignity to share stories of my wild youth with my children or will I water my past down until I appear nothing more than their perpetually-vanilla mother whose most exhilarating and rebellious moment was attending a rock concert? Will my children see the fact that I (finally) have everything together and assume that my life was not the chaotic mess of emotion and alcohol and fear that is a university student's life? An intriguing thought.
Intriguing even more so, as I am one of the children Kerouac refers to who rarely saw photos of her parents. Those images that were shared were from special occasions or other landmark moments such as a graduation or new house. To be honest, it is astonishing how little I know about my parents' past lives. I do not know how they came to be a couple or how my father proposed. I know very little about their separate childhoods or the struggles they may have faced in their youth. My parents have always been my parents and nothing more, and as I come closer to entering the true adult stage of my life this notion terrifies me. I have spent years attempting to discover and mold a unique identity for myself, an identity which I know could one day be erased by the embracing of a new role such as "wife" or "mother".
I am not over-thinking this. I have already seen perceptions towards me change as I made the transition from "friend" to "girlfriend", and those who I once considered true companions and lifelong friends began treating me differently simply because my role in the group had changed. I, however, had not changed. I have not changed. I am still blunt and cynical and sarcastic and witty and silly and sometimes shy or crude at a turn. I still have a forward tongue-in-cheek sexuality that causes people to be caught off guard when I display the intelligence I have been honing since my days as a bullied child. I have not become condescending or prudish because I have a significant other, though others seem to want to force me into this role. I am just me.
Don't get me wrong though, I do not advocate being best friends with your child. My parents made it very clear that they were the ones in a position of authority, and I am so much better off because of the way they raised me. But (there's that nasty word again) the older I get the more I wish I knew about them. I wish they had shared with me what strange and wonderful things they wanted to be when they grew up, if only so I could have felt more comfortable with my own unrealistic longings. I wish they had shared some of their heartbreaks, if there were any, so I wouldn't have felt desolate and alone on so many occasions. I wish they had explained the joy of becoming parents so I hadn't feared the phenomenon for such a long time. I wish I had known them as they were, and not simply as the label I had placed upon them.
Indeed, I am one of those possessing this most "pitiful form of ignorance." A child of the new generation, forever idealizing the past and fearing the future.
