Old Home

The home of my childhood. I sit and watch my mother and father bicker back and forth - their way of showing love, I suppose. My dad sits in the lazy boy and my mom sits in the chair next to him. She is playing on her Nintendo DS. "Shit," she shouts out at random. "Why do they give you colors that they know you can't use?" Tom has spent the last hour and a half trying to set up my mom and dad's webcams. Of course, they each have their own individual laptop. They can not share. So Tom must go back and forth between the two of them attempting to help my computer illiterate father and distracted mother.

The webcams are going to be used for video calls when we are living in Shanghai. I am extremely excited and extremely nervous to leave them. My parents have three children; my thirty-three year old sister, me, and my eight (soon to be nine) year old brother. The catch is: my sister is mentally handicapped and so is my brother. And my brother isn't really my brother - he's my sister's baby whom my parents adopted because she (obviously) was unable to take care of him. I suppose the gist of all this information is that I am basically an only child. I can feel their unified need to have me close and the suffocation of obligation comes with it.

My family is unusually small. Both sets of grandparents are deceased. My mother is an only child. My father has two brothers; one single - no kids, the other deceased. Is it simple selfishiness to wonder, "What will they do without me?" Or is it the truth? I can't stay for them. But at the same time...I hate the thought of not being there for them.