The Other Life

Sometimes I wish I was someone else. As an Asian child growing up in Wisconsin in the 70's and 80's there weren't a lot of other people who looked like me. And truth be told, in the community, although people were polite, I was never really treated as well as my friends who were not Asian--these other people around me who had brown, red, and blond hair.

I was treated like a second class citizen. And I learned to believe it. So growing up in my tweens and teens I used to daydream that I had blond hair and green eyes. That I was someone else.

Now I live in California. Asians are plentiful and actually very much the norm. At this turn of the century we see Asians in television who don't have foreign accents. There are Asian children on billboards and in commercials. Things we take for granted now. Things I never grew up with but am so glad to see presented in this modern world. We can still do better--but that is a subject for a different blog entry.

Before I get too far ahead of myself let me explain one thing. In the tutoring world we have a term for parents who are so in charge of their children's lives that they don't allow the children to do anything for themselves.

They've given up their lives for their child and live through them by scheduling their appointments even when the child is a teenager capable of doing it him or herself. They speak for the child. They are there asking questions every 15 minutes to make sure everything is okay. They want to know what their child is thinking and feeling and breathing.

We called them "helicopter parents." Because like a helicopter, they hover.

In the past 5 to 7 years with experience, age, and living life in general--the ability to own who I was, who I am, and who I will become has developed itself. An appreciation of culture, of differences, and of what is learned from poor choices and mistakes has taken the place of certain insecurities and doubts.

But every once in awhile when I least expect it thoughts of a different life flit through my mind. The desires I'd had from childhood to have a different life and be a different person creep in on stealthy legs and are blindsiding. It's a universal and human thing. I just don't know what to do with it when it happens.

There are a few options. A person could analyze it to death. They could say, "Ah well, nothing is to be done just focus on what can be done in life now." Or, they could just wait until it passes.

It's the other life. The other lives. The other...everything. It's what we dream about when we can't control what our lives are like now. When we need to let go but don't know how to or want to or are afraid to.

Like helicopter parents we "hover" in our own lives and don't let it breathe. To have space to grow. To stand on its own. We have good intentions. But then what is the saying? "The path to hell is paved with good intentions." And we create our own hell by dwelling, if only for a few moments, in a life that doesn't belong to us.

We learn a lot between childhood and adulthood. How to be an adult. How to live our lives. How to be who we are. Too bad it takes so long. As Herbert Henry Asquith said, "Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life." How true. How very true.