Family tides

Every family probably claims itself to be a rocky one. We're not all a bunch of screaming lunatics who steal sisters' clothes and punch brothers' faces like reality TV suggests (although I did bite my brother once), but bonding moments are often interrupted at the daughter leaving almost empty juice containers in the fridge and opening a new one. Okay, that might be me. Let's find another example. Families find tension when they realize someone ate all the chocolate chips and there's nothing to bake cookies with. Guilty again. You know what? I don't like these examples. You get the general idea.
My childhood was pretty blissed out, what with drawing on the basement floor with pastels and swinging indoors. But with the lucky pre-teen years came the harsh reality that even though my mother was my best friend, she would eventually make me do the dishes, and I, horrified at this absolute injustice, would call her a bitch for it. We had a deal though, that three strikes, and I was out of the living room and in my bedroom. Ten strikes, and I was out of my brother's list of sane and acceptable people. Twenty bajillion strikes, and I was out of the house, treckking up the hills of my neighborhood to go live with my father (he lives about a fifteen minute walk away, but it sounds more dramatic to treck up hills). My mom is a saintly patient person, and even after the roughest of fights, she will cheerfully sing made up words to popular tunes. And she is still my best friend. But get us in a house together for more than two nights, and we will create our own World War III. About the dishes. It happens.
While both my parents' houses are academic in the sense that bookshelves are displayed in several corners of the living room, and I can't talk to my parents at the end of December or May, my father's house has an academic air. I wouldn't go so far as to say we're pompous, but it's not uncommon to quote Henry David Thoreau at dinner, or to wake up at 7:00A.M. and plan what time you brush your teeth. Spontaneity is observed, sometimes questioned, but never practiced. We are all very cordial to one another, like we're at a never ending dinner party. But since I moved in with my step-family when I was fourteen, it took me a while to remember I was living with the people my dad would take me to see a couple times a month. I could stop freaking out about the sounds emanating from the den, they were just my stepbrother beating up zombies on his xbox. No big deal. I love this family, but sometimes it feels like a love I would have towards a friend. Like, I'm at dinner, making pleasant conversation about Charlie's freshman year of high school, and then after putting up a front, I go, "phew. Now I can go home and bask in all my weird habits." Then I start singing "Sexy and I know it," in the shower, realize I am home, and that all my stepbrother's friends have the privilege of hearing an 18 year old make a fool of herself off key.
I've always had the choice to live in a house where my mom treated my friends like daughters, laughed and gossiped with me, yet got in screaming matches every time we got too close. Or I could have opted to live in a pleasant household, where to-do lists got crossed off, but where we went our separate ways and where intimacy felt forced. Staying in my room for most of the day is worth the avoidance of fights and tense moments, but no matter how nice it is to be next to my Johnny Depp posters for hours, it can still get lonely.
Since I'll be living on my own soon, I've learned to appreciate both kinds of families--the close but angry kind, and the cordial but surface kind. Both of my parents are extremely generous with the amount of time and energy they put into the happiness of their kids. Yet I'm constantly faced with "what-if"s; I'm still finding out which living situation is right for me. But what I know for sure is that my family has different kind of oddities, but my love for them is the same.

Namaste.