By Michael Evans

     I guess I always knew the day would come. 

     Somewhere, deep in the hidden recesses of my mind, I knew.  I fought.  I resisted.  But in the end, it was all for naught.  Resistance, as they say, is futile.  The day came anyway.

     I became my parents.

     Don’t get me wrong.  Unlike so many lead singers of 80s hair bands, I don’t hate my parents.  I love them.  Very much.  And unlike so many rappers on the airwaves these days, I had a good childhood.  My father’s military career allowed him to provide a nice life for his family.  I may not have always had the things I wanted to have as a kid, but my parents made sure I always had the things I needed.  Of course, I didn’t understand (or agree with) that distinction at the time, but it makes all the sense in the world to me now.  And I’m grateful for that distinction, and to them for living by it.

     But I didn’t necessarily want to become them.

     When I was 20 and an optimistic undergraduate, becoming my parents wasn’t even on the radar.  I had a path to blaze- places to see, people to meet, a world to conquer.  I would stand on my own two feet and make a destiny that would be mine alone. 

     As time passes, however, I realize that my feet were rarely planted on undiscovered country, because I was standing on my parents’ shoulders as well as the shoulders of all the ancestors that had come before me.

     There are differences between us, to be sure; I am not a carbon copy.  But more often than I’d ever imagined, I find myself uttering phrases, engaging in actions, and looking at the world in ways that remind me of them.

     I believe my daughter's the culprit.  Nothing brings out a person’s parents the way that having children of one's own does.  Like my Southern accent that somehow manages to lie dormant until I’m either extraordinarily tired, speaking with a relative, or sitting in a room full of Southerners, I've found that I tend to revert to saying the things I heard from my folks when I grew up at occasionally odd and unpredictable intervals.

     I wonder whether the things they said to me are the same things said to them when they were children.  Life has this funny way of working in cycles as if it was some great scientific law dictating that nothing is ever really lost, merely recycled and passed down.

     The most recent reminder came last weekend during a road trip.  I've always loved to drive; something about the open road, the feel of the steering wheel in my hands, and a few hundred miles between origin and destination never fails to clear my head and allow me to think.  And what I found myself thinking about over and over again was how time had made me a grownup. 

     What a cruel trick, for growing up, it had been me in the backseat trying to find ways to divert myself from thinking about when my Dad would stop the car so my sister and I could stretch, grab a bite to eat, or go to the bathroom.

     And now I was the one in the driver's seat. Literally.  I was the one who was asked when we were gonna get there, when we were going to stop for food or take a bathroom break. 

     I had become my Dad.  Of course, I'd been a Dad for some time now, nearly five years,  but when had I become my Dad?  I log on to Facebook to stay in touch with people I knew in high school or college and frequently find myself seeing double- the faces and bodies they wear now and the faces and bodies I remember from back then.  As adults, they look like the mental pictures I carried in my head as a teenager of what a parent should look like.  No doubt, they probably see the same when they view my pictures. 

     My Mom always told me this would happen.  I guess the kid in me thought I would be different.