I’ve just finished a book called, “The Dichotomy Of A Crazy Person.” It’s a memoir about growing up between my mother and my father, two polar opposite humans who are both equally insane in their own way.
I was raised by a single mother who chain smoked, swore like a truck driver, and left me for weekends with a grandmother who talked openly about sex over her all night hot toddies. “Misty” she would say, “I’m old, and I can do whaaatever the hell I want! Don’t judge meee for drinkin’!” She would cheers me with her mug: One part bourbon, one part water, a splash of coke. She would break in conversation to stir it with her finger then carry on talking about her younger days of being “hot”.
My family isn’t the model type, we’re not what you’d see depicted in a television series. We don’t hug upon sight, we rarely say, “I love you”. My mothers side is a tough side, hard upbringings, and hard personalities. Our problems don’t drowned out and fade to the overwhelming buzz of pre-recorded laughter. In fact, we reign supreme among dysfunctional people across the world. While my friends had parents who sang to them, I was raised to a certain degree, in a constant state of instability without any kind of balance what-so-ever until one winter day when I was nine. At nine things became much more complicated, but the kind of complication that has its good along with its bad. If there’s anything in the world I’m capable of it is adapting. I can be picked up and relocated, changed, beaten down, built up, and still remain sane to some degree, somehow. I attribute this to my ever changing childhood, to my free-spirited mother, and her “interesting” parenting style. Lucky for me, eventually, I was balanced by an additional parent, my father, who is an educated, conservative Iranian-born business man, who brought an entire different level of crazy to my life in the form of Charity Balls, Persian parties in Beverly Hills, four new siblings, insane expectations, and an all too old-world mentality when it comes to raising teenagers.
M. E. Evans 