Some traits were cleanly and clearly inherited. She didn’t dispute that. But those traits didn’t interest her. What interested her were those traits that developed in opposition to the behavior of parents, and at times in an almost mechanical antithesis. “Take being late,” she said. This was the example she always gave. “Let’s say that you are a young woman who has grown up with a mother who is always late. She’s late getting you from school, taking you to doctors’ appointments, meeting you and your partner for lunch. Each of these stings. Each is absorbed as a moment of neglect. It is not likely that you will repeat this behavior and inflict the same tardiness on your own intimates. Compulsive punctuality is the likely outcome.” She straightened her notes on the podium. She could feel her throat thickening, as it often did at this point in the speech. That lunch! She had been so proud to introduce her mother to Angela, and so humiliated when they had waited not only the twenty forewarned minutes, but thirty-five, forty, nearly an hour. Angela had patted her hand in a way that confirmed that she had made the right choice, a somewhat silver lining. She made her notes crooked and fought down the coming tears by remembering the medical name for what she was experiencing, not the awareness of the etiology of her compulsive punctuality, not the melancholy of her memory, but the lump in her throat: globus pharyngeus.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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