my normal

When you live with something all the time, it becomes normal to you even when it turns out to be really unusual or uncommon. This opens up a clear avenue for a serious discussion on how this skewed perception of normalcy contributes to the perpetual cycle of abuse--or how I don't get psychiatric treatment because to me mental illness is 'normal' and I have no idea what the alternative would even be like. But I can't maintain the requisite level of maturity to have that conversation. I think of seriousness the same way I think of high heels--they're nice to have and wear occasionally if I feel like doing something a little differently, but they're not comfortable and if I do it too much I will probably break my leg.

So instead this is going to be about the minor (and neutral) things that were normal in my life but turned out to be fairly unusual.

All the dinner forks I've seen outside my parent's house have four tines. It's just one of those universally accepted truths of the world--forks have four tines. I don't think I ever saw any other deviation from this 'rule'. But in the cutlery set my parents have and that I grew up using... all the forks had three tines. Since I've never seen such a thing except at home, I assume this is really unusual though not particularly noteworthy.

Both sets of my grandparents got divorced long before I was born, so I grew up knowing all four of my grandparents but they were four separate entities instead of being two couples. The idea of attending a grandparent's 50th anniversary party or anything else that focuses on their long partnership is... completely foreign to me. Grandparents who still liked each other was completely beyond my experience.

It's not really noteworthy now, but in the late 80s and early 90s when I was still quite young, home computers weren't very common since they were expensive and not especially useful. But since my dad is like a computer-guy-hipster (he was programming computers before computers were mainstream!) he would sometimes bring one home on loan to work on it. So for most of my younger years the idea of having a computer in the house was novel to most people but par for the course to me.

My mom put my brother and I in the same places in the back seat of the car our entire lives--him on the left, me on the right. That was how it always was and it was never questioned and neither he nor I ever (seriously, never!) thought to switch. I don't often sit in the back seat of a car anymore, but if I do I sit on the right side--sitting on the left side is so weird for me that it's almost physically uncomfortable, like wearing shoes on the wrong feet.

This one is a little weird because most people aren't even aware something like this is possible, but... my dad sinks in water. I know, human bodies are buoyant--but my dad sinks like a rock without fail and he always has. (Most likely because he's fairly densely muscular in relation to his height.) It was slightly novel to me, actually, since he's still the only person I've ever known who can't float, but never anything more than a mild anomaly. But it's a sufficiently unusual thing that not many people know it can happen at all.

My parents happened to be born in the same year so they were always the same age. For some reason this just became so completely, immutably normal to me that it genuinely came as a surprise when I found out that other people's parents usually had at least a few years between them. And to be honest I still sometimes have to remind myself that my parents are definitely the minority in this case because it still strikes me as ever so slightly unusual that few couples are the same age.

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And that's all I could think of tonight. The problem with identifying the 'normals' that are uncommon or unusual to most other people is that, until you learn otherwise, you never think of any part of your life as being anything but mundane. For all I know, I could be sitting on a treasure trove of bizarreness without realizing it because I don't know what 'normal' is for anyone but me. As much as we all like to think we're capable of changing our own perspective, no matter how hard you try you can't experience 'normal' the way anyone else does.