Ann was my best friend growing-up. I’ve known her all of my thirty-eight years. I’m always here to remind her of those funny little childhood habits of hers like the squoochy thing she used to do with her hands when she was excited. I delight in telling her children and mine about the time when we were eight years old running around the swing set playing and laughing so hard that she wet her pants. Unfortunately, she remembers just as many details about me and frequently reveals to me those suppressed and long-forgotten qualities that were prominent in my early days. Recently Ann and I were discussing a tee-shirt that she proposed to buy for my eight year old daughter, Emma. The size I informed her must be a large since Emma insists on wearing oversize clothes on her undersize body. Ann laughed and said it was only right of Emma since she had a mother who never wanted any piece of clothing tight enough to touch any part of her body. Well, am I glad to have passed on that trait to my offspring!
One glance at Emma demonstrates quite clearly the lovely genes she inherited from her dad. She has his ocean-blue eyes, high cheek bones and delicate lips. In school she delves deeply into the morass of mathematics and delights in complex problem solving just like her math whiz dad. Hand her a set of rules and she carries them out with precision just like my favorite guy.
From me she inherited a more subtle set of genes. They languish under the surface and the casual observer might miss them entirely, but not my husband or my family or those who know me through and through. Emma shows sure signs of the oversize-clothes-only gene and that is only the start. In the past year I have seen the dreaded dawdling gene come to full expression. We’ll ask Emma to proceed with any task like taking a shower and she smiles and replies sweetly that she’ll hop right to it. Ten minutes later we’ll open the bathroom door to hear sweet humming sounds emerging from the cloud of steam. “How’s it going?” we’ll ask. “Just lathering my hair,” she’ll singsong. Ten minutes later upon peeking through the door we are likely to catch her peering around the shower curtain at the mirror to check out her hairdo held magically in place by the shampoo bubbles. We’ll say, “Need to hurry Em.” “Sure, I’m hurrying,” she’ll say. Ten minutes later she’ll be washing and singing unmoved by our pressure toward haste … pleasant, but dawdling.
She has my pack-rat gene, too, which is, unfortunately, a dominant gene and when present cannot be partially expressed. Em saves everything. She has the world’s largest collection of beads in her bedside table and sheets of unused unicorn stickers in her desk drawer. In her toy box she has every plastic animal that has ever crossed her palm from arcade prizes to Pet Shop toys. She collects treasures from driveway rocks to plastic tie-wraps. Her favorite treasures are computer bits-not bytes- that she picks up when her dad repairs his computer at home. Bits like phone wire clippings, defunct chips and miscellaneous screws. Sometimes she weasels treasures from her brother like the sizeable collection of Matchbox cars that she has amassed one by one by admiring them and cajoling the gift from her brother. She doesn’t play with them, but just adds them to her cache.
I long to claim the blue eyes as my gift to her, but here I am with green eyes. I wish to garner credit for her lovely olive skin, but I cannot deny my freckle speckled nose. I pretend that I am the model of tailored clothing, time management and parsimonious collection of treasures, but I recognize my contributions to Emma’s make-up as clearly as the freckles on my face.
Now I’m mighty worried about my son. He’s been leaving his tooth-fairy money lying around and I’m sure it’s that leave-your-money-on-the-back-of-the-toilet gene.