I Am My Father's Child

It is so easy when you have children to assume that the girls will turn out just like their mothers and the boys will be just like their father's, isn't it?  I mean really, how many times have you heard women (especially those with children) say "OMG, I'm just like my Mom"  or, "I have become my Mother!"  There isn't anything wrong with that either but it is not what happened for me.

I have become my Father.  Weird right?  To be perfectly honest, I am really more like him-by a HUGE degree- than I am like my Mom.  My Mom and my Dad are about as different as you can get. He's wildly conservative, she's a flaming liberal.  He lives off grid, she thinks our city of 5+ million doesn't have enough culture, he has no interest in travel, she would have loved to see the world.  Its probably why they divorced in the long run.

 My Dad teaching T1 to shoot.  I do not approve of guns

 Snowball fights

Me, My Dad, T2, Bonus Daughter & T1

I have turned out just like him, but in ways you would not have expected.  I do not agree with him on a political level, Im more like my mother there.  The travel too.  God forbid I ever have to live off grid, because Pioneer Woman I am not, but it's the deeper ways that I am him. The ways that I handle my political beliefs, while opposite of his, are exactly the same. I am willing to defend my beliefs, willing to engage in debate, willing to dismiss that which I think is wrong or misguided, and willing to argue until the wee hours of the night for what I think is right. So is he, now we just argue with each other. Our surface "personalities" are so very different that you might not think we were at all alike, but it's below the surface, where the "real person" hums that we are the same.

Sometimes that makes for a hard relationship, because we are so different in our beliefs yet so totally the same in our personalities, we clash more than I do with any other person. Or maybe it is that I am more willing to clash with him than with someone else. It is easy to clash with someone who, deep down inside, you know what they are thinking, because it's the same thing you are thinking. I know just how far I can push it, just how far I can go, before there is a real problem. It's the same distance he can push me before I have a real problem.

Let me just say that my kids?  They do not understand this at all. The ranting, raving, and arguing about what a total prick (me)/ total genius (him), that Bill O'Reilly is upsets them. They have never lived this way and don't "get" it. So, when things have gone too far, I reel it back, and he being me and me being him, he goes right along with it. Its almost a form of entertainment for us, but not them, so we back down together.

I know this to be true because my mother always tells me "You are just like your father!"

 The funniest part is that for the last 15 years, she has lived with me!