I have a confession: I like coffee. A lot. I drank it as a kid, when it supposedly stunts your growth or something, but I don’t make a habit of taking my advice from stiff-coated scientists who try to scare us with a million different possibilities and probabilities and prospective causes of death because we’re all going to die anyway. Right. So at 6, I stand in the kitchen as my parents pour me half a cup, but I refuse to drink it unless my dad concocts it. His mixture of sugar and half-and-half is a little bit of magic, and upon my first whiff I wonder whether the owl carrying his Hogwarts letter has died en route. Once only the dregs remain in my mug, I pour my mom’s second cup. 3 sugars, only 3. I stand with big girl pride, taking each pristinely white cube between my teeny fingernails, dipping the stark crystal into the steaming abyss just slightly, mesmerized watching the sugar soak up the coffee, waiting until the cube turns caramel and mushy, dropping it in.
Plop.

My mother was amused with my imaginings for a while, until she grew impatient and wanted to do it herself. Same with my dad. He became too busy to mix the coffee and creamer. But that’s ok; I learned. Now I can reach the cabinet with the Ethiopian Roast and I can grind the beans in the white grinder and I can pour the liquification of adulthood into my favorite white mug with my initials and I can watch the white cream make a milky cloud overtaking the darkness and I can drop my own white candy into the cup and stir it all with a spoon and savor it by myself.

Pull the picture roll forward a few more years--- There. Can you see me? A family of 6 lazing in the living room after a surprise dinner out on a school night. Mother is on the chair, children are on the couch, but wait- something is missing. Enter father, stage left, emerging from the depths of the basement bearing a folder in hand.

“We’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while” the mother begins.

And the adults proceed to tell the dark tale of the extra brother who was born in college, meaning the family of 6 is truly a family of 7. But that was never the story, because the boy has his own, written with another adoptive family. I open my mouth in protest:

“You’re kidding.” Because I truly believe that cameras are going to pop out and music will start playing and a celebrity is going to gleefully scream “YOU’VE BEEN PUNKED!”

But the adults just shake their heads.

Then I say nothing. Because this is the type of lie that causes anger beyond words. A violence so persistent that it is all I can do not to split them in half so that they can feel the way I feel as my DNA severs and my life divides into 2 halves: The before the truth and the after. I sit as my brain runs in circles and I cannot wrap my mind around it and my brain is sprinting around a track and I can’t make my mind bend around the truth and my brain runs in circles while I sit as the anger mounts and the blood rushes to my head and my eyes and my stomach and first I see violet then pink then maroon then burgundy then rust. The curtains draw red.

And finally, the closing scene. I sit in my friend’s living room, jittery from the shot of espresso, my nerves evident at the state of my fingernails. I would never be able to sneak out of my parent’s house, too many creaky doors and alarm systems. The guilt of disobeying them would pull me back by my hair as soon as I grasped the doorknob. But here. Here I can go into the dark at 1:30 a.m. and hear the smell of independence on my tongue. Pure, unprovoked rebellion brought me to that park where all lights are extinguished by the coolness of the trees. My first real choice. On my own. I savor the burn as the blackness runs down my throat and dulls my senses until all I know is the steady pulse of my fingertips as they trace “freedom, freedom, freedom” into the onyx sky.


Family is a funny thing. It is a concept almost completely unique to humans, save a few animal species. But even then, these animals stay in family units out of necessity. Wolves create their packs to hunt. Lions form their prides to kill. Ants build their colonies to gather. Humans grow their families to—to what? To love and support each other. Sure, this is necessary in the beginning. Just like a bird nudges her chick from the nest, so must a human adult introduce their child to new things. Like morals, and rules, and coffee. But eventually, parents are no longer necessary. Yet we are dependent on them until 18, and sometimes longer. Children need to become independent earlier. We as humans cannot be expected to grow up and learn for ourselves if our parents are constantly shadowing our every move.

If children were forced to be on their own before the age of 18, the rebellious teenage years would be nonexistent. No swiping the key to the liquor cabinet and slipping off to the woods and guzzling Grey Goose. This rebellion presents itself in some form in the majority of teenagers, because parents are breathing down our necks to behave and be perfect. Parents are terrified that we will turn out like one of the deranged teens from an Anthony Burgess novel. Adults forget that they make mistakes too. Mistakes that can tear their kids apart. Alcohol, abuse, betrayal. But hypocrisy is habit, and adults love to shield and warn us from mess-ups in an attempt to make us better. In reality, the overprotection causes us to hold on longer, making humans as a race codependent in a world where we are expected to be independent. If we always have the safety net of our parents to run back to, it will be harder to make decisions in the real world without them.

We cannot choose our families or our parents, it’s all a matter of the DNA alignment. But we do choose the other people we interact with. And why would I pick parents who have lied to and hurt me over friends who have helped me up? We cannot place all of our faith in our families, for time inevitably spins us farther apart, and our lives are no longer one in the same. I have learned more in the course of my life from myself and my friends and from authors and teachers and complete strangers than I have learned from my parents. Growth is what is important in life. When I look back on my life so far, the colors blur together; white, black, red, green, yellow, orange, purple. And you know what? My life with my family is brown. Dirt. Family is where the seed is planted and family is where the roots are anchored and family will be remembered by the sun on the leaves and the storms that shook the branches. But the amazing thing about trees is that they can be repotted, relocated, and grafted with other limbs. As ‘the future,’ we cannot keep relying on the MiracleGro that our moms packed in our lunchboxes when the darkness sets in and the going gets tough. So buck up, branch out, and live on.