Whenever I’m tasked to write about my relationship with my parents, feelings anxiety and apprehension inevitably arise. It’s not that I’ve had a poor relationship with my parents, but that there has always been an intangible gap between us which has kept us from communicating as well as I would have liked. After some thought, I came to the realization that the root cause for that gap may have stemmed from the significant differences in values between my Mother and Father.
My Mother had a strict, traditional Asian upbringing. The role of each member of the family was to contribute his/her share of time, sweat and earnings to the greater good of the family. Higher education, if it could be obtained, is highly prized and always a priority for the children of Asian parents. For my Mother, ensuring her children’s education has always been her number one priority. As I child, it took me a long time to appreciate why she had pushed so hard for me to study so diligently. For outsiders, my relationship with her may have seemed like that of an “oppressed” boy being controlled by his Mother. From my perspective, I had a hard time seeing her as anything but a Mother who was never satisfied by anything that I accomplished because it wasn’t “good enough” for her. She had high academic expectations because she understood how important it would be later in my adult life. She never had the privilege of attending college when she was younger.
My Father’s stance on education was quite the opposite. He had received extensive electronics training in the Marine Corps after high school, and even earned a college degree once his tour of duty had ended. However, the value of hard working and earning a living took priority over education for him. His main focus was getting enough education to be able to enter the work force as quickly as possible. Earning a living was critical for his family to survive during his childhood. Growing up in a small, middle-America town where work was hard to find, someone had to bring home the bacon. That conflict between work and education created a large divide between my parents, and made it especially hard for me to converse with either. I couldn’t relate the significance of my higher education – and its personal enjoyment for me – to my Father because in his eyes I was not being truly productive. And when I struggled to make tuition payments in college, his first suggestion would be that perhaps I should just “find a job” instead of racking up more debt from college. At the time I was very upset by his attitude towards my schooling, but I’ve come to understand that he did mean well given his experiences in life.
Fortunately, the quality of communication between both parents gradually improved well after I had left college and entered the work force. Today I am able to speak more freely about most subjects without hesitation. My old childhood anxiety still comes to the forefront when I think about the communication chasm that still exists about certain topics, though, such as love or marriage or children. It seems that I’ve still got plenty more life experiences to get under my proverbial belt before I can fully relate to them about those other matters.
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Reading you passage makes me appreciate my relationship with my parents a lot more. It was not till I left my teenage years though that I was even able to do so. Luckily I grew out of and built a bond with them. My parents were strict with me but never pushed me to my limits, I can appreciate their actions now also because it helped me to become such a successful and well organized young adult. Your story reminds me of the way my mom spoke about her relationship with her parents and how nothing ever seemed good enough and they always wanted more. She could never really go to her mom about her problems because her mom just never understood. I commend people like you guys for being able to get through it. I would not know how to handle it if I could not communicate with my mother because sometimes I feel like her and my dad are all I have. I am happy to hear that you can now speak with them more easily then before and I think this was able to happen over time because you grew into an adult and the pressure is not there so much as it was when you were a young boy. Parents also do not realize how they push their children away by doing so, I know it would hurt my feelings. Since my parents were always by my side and supporting me through everything it always made me want to accomplish more and thus I will use when my time has come to be a mother.
ReplyDeleteI can completely understand the issues you had/have with your parents because my parent's are the same way--they have two completely opposite perspectives about how to do everything. My mother is very strict, and things have to be done her way, always, or it's wrong--even if the results are the same. She's also very focused on family, and of the school of thought that family comes first, last, and always, and if a person's focus is not on the well-being of their family, they are bad, selfish people. Whereas my dad is more relaxed, and understand and accepts that people have different ways of looking at the world. Like my mother, my dad strongly believes that family is extremely important, but he is different in that he also believes that personal development is key for a better life. Also unlike my mom, my dad doesn’t really mind how you do things so long as you do them ethically and get the same results—but my mom freaks out if you wipe down the sink from left to right instead of right to left. Like you, when I was in middle/high school I always did my best to get their approval, but never really managed 100% approval from both, but like you said, as you get older and start making your own way, it gets easier to talk with them about some things and understand their perspectives. Like you said, I still get anxious when I talk to them because of how awkward we were with each other when I was younger, but now that we’re on slightly more equal footing, things have been much better. Great blog!
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