How We Turned Out the Way We Did

Our parents tried their best to provide us with the perfect childhood.

house in the ‘burbs

swing set and playhouse in the back yard

birthday parties with balloons and pink cake

a dog and a cat

hand-sewn Halloween costumes…

the whole package.

Our childhood neighborhood in the burbs.

Fast forward thirty years. Our parents look at the lives that their daughters live, scratch their heads with a mixture of amused puzzlement and mild horror, and say: “How did this happen?”

On the surface, the crazy lives that we two sisters live may not have much in common. To begin with, one of us [the one who normally writes this blog] lives in the Middle East and the other [the guest blogger, yours truly] lives in Detroit. But, if you go back far enough [as all psychologists will tell you that you need to do], the common denominator in much of the craziness of the lives of these two sisters begins with these three words:
Salt Lake City.

Those mountains were the backdrop of our childhood.

Our Midwest family was transplanted to Salt Lake City, Utah in the late 1970’s. It was a very different place than the one from which we had come. We didn’t know anyone there. It was arid. There were mountains. Plagues of grasshoppers. And it was Mormon. Very Mormon. And we weren't.

Let me enumerate just a few of the ramifications and effects that this environment has produced in our adult lives:

Cultural Outsiders

Living as minorities in a majority culture is something that few WASP-y children in the U.S. have the opportunity to do, yet this is what Salt Lake City provided for us. I’m not just talking here about living as non-Mormons among the Mormon majority, although there were plenty of cultural mysteries to be unraveled there. I’m also talking about things like puzzling over what could possibly be fun about trying to cheat death by plunging down a snowy, tree-lined mountain on two waxed pieces of board.

We became used to knowing that there was probably some kind of cultural explanation for what was going on around us but often not knowing at the time what it was; aware of some kind of cultural undercurrent that we couldn’t exactly put our finger on. And thus our “normal” became the position of the cultural outsider and was a medium that we eventually continued to seek in life.

Danger, Smanger

Places where other people generally don’t want to live or vacation [like, for example, the most dangerous city in America] are attractive to us. I don’t have a good explanation of this one. Perhaps it was the fact that we saw mountain lions roaming down the sidewalks of our suburban neighborhood or, more simply, that our parents took a significant plunge in moving to Salt Lake City to begin with. With the exception of skiing, my sister and I take a fairly fearless approach to trying new things in life.  While realistic about the possibility of violence or danger […yes, it is in fact a possibility that I could get mauled by a mountain lion while walking to my friend’s house], the threat of it didn’t consume us.

Hair Problems

Maybe we can’t blame this one on Salt Lake City as much as the fact that the ‘70’s and ‘80’s were just a very bad time for hair. So, hair savoir-faire is just a vanity that both of us have had to put aside in our current places of residence. My sister has blogged on this extensively here and here and here. And don’t get me wrong – my dear friend Ms. Brenda of the Designed to Shine Salon has always done right by me. It’s just that I’m the only person who ever comes in asking for a perm to make my hair curly instead of straight.

A Love of Strays

Having been an outsider, one develops a lifetime compassion for outsiders and strays. This includes animals, people, and in my case, buildings. This leads to my last and final point…

Photo from a fascinating project about Detroit you can see here.

A Love of Lost Causes

I have an incredibly deep love of things that are unlovable and for lost causes. A delightful afternoon for me is tramping through an eighty year old abandoned building with a client, stepping over squatter’s trash and the crumbling remains of the collapsed ceiling, and thinking about how beautiful the building was and how beautiful it could be again.  This is also why my sister and the group of women that she works with craft recycled trash into works of art. We share a vision for transformation – for the possibilities that transcend what things are and offer a glimpse of what they could become. Because, in our belief [a belief, that I do believe is shared by our parents], there may be lost causes but there is truly no lost person. There is Hope for everyone. Even if they did grow up as an outsider in Salt Lake City.