To top off a year spent hosting visitors of every type, I recently finished hosting the most important group: the family (családom, if my Hungarian is correct…which it likely isn’t, considering a spent the better part of their visit introducing my younger sister as my older brother. Jaj! Hungarian defeats me again!)

I won’t claim it was perfect — my family is as dysfunctional as the next, and I highly recommend against ever trying to share a bathroom with my older sister — but it was certainly special. Namely, what made me excited was getting to see my mother enjoy her first trip abroad.

My mom is, in a word, awesome. It sounds Hallmark-card cheesy, but she is my best friend: caring, loving and 100°% supportive of me, even in situations where many parents might put pressure on one (such as one’s Georgetown freshman child, who is currently sinking the family and herself into debt, calling to say she is dropping out of the business school to pursue the ever-financially unwise field of English literature. Most ’rents would at least flinch. My mom? I want you to be happy. Simple as that).

The Best Mom Ever at the Prettiest Bridge Ever

The Best Mom Ever at the Prettiest Bridge Ever

But my mom and I are also extremely different in many ways, not the least of which is how we have approached our lives as women. Mom, despite coming of age in the hip-to-be-feminist 1960s, could be textbook Traditional Wife and Mother: married high school sweetheart, stayed at home for 12 years raising 3 kids, takes care of house and constantly self-sacrifices, and lives in the same zip code where she grew up.  Whereas Mom was all settled down with Dad by the age of 15, my life has been a bit more…well, un-settled (I suppose that is what you call more than 15 moves in less than ten years). As such, while for me, my greatest ambition in high school was to get a passport and stamps in it, mom’s was the white wedding she got as soon as she graduated college.  So, international jet-setting was sort of out of the question for her. At 57, then, this was her first trip outside the U.S., Niagra Falls notwithstanding.

Baby Sis (not Big Brother) and the famous Trabi

Baby Sis (not Big Brother) and the famous Trabi

And for me, being able to show her Europe for the first time was wonderful. Seeing the sights I have already become accustomed to — St. Stephen’s cathedral, the Chain Bridge at night, Castle Hill and the Central market — through her eyes made me love them all the more.  her excitement made mine increase tenfold. It also felt like I was able to “explain” myself to my family better. They know, and I know, that I am the black sheep. I always have been, from my decision to spend a high school summer taking extra school for fun to the fact that I am the only one who has not (and will not) settle in Pittsburgh, I stick out; I remain the geeky-bookish-city type in a family of suburban non-nerds.  By taking them through Budapest, showing off the new home in my ever-unstable existence, I feel like I was able to let them in, a little, on what makes me tick.

And, if they left with nothing else, I at least can say with certainty that they, too, are lovers of langós and pálinka.  What else would do for my “cultural ambassador” mission?