I think I resent my parents.
I dont want to say hate, it’s too strong of a word. But I dont think I can comfortably say I like who they are as people. I thought that with all the conversations I had with my mum I healed and I grew out of this. I grew up and I wasn’t the child that wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t the child that wasn’t smart enough. I wasn’t the child who wasn’t pretty enough. I thought I grew up and achieved all of that. But from the shore, it doesn’t seem so anymore.
I think I grew up and I hid myself. I grew up and I wasn’t obligated to tell them anything anymore. I wasn’t obligated to listen and I wasn’t obligated to perform to their opinion. I think in the meantime that worked great. But looking from where I stand now, I think my parents hurt me in so many ways I didn’t even realise I was carrying with me today.
The way my parents raised me, and as they proudly claim, an 'independent' and 'critical' person. Looking on it now, I think my parents abandoned me. Their idea of creating an independent thinker was throwing me into the deep end and waiting for me to learn to swim. I suppose I did learn to swim, but I think after a while I learned to float and when you float there’s this perfect level when you’re facing the sky but your ears are underwater and you can’t hear any more. After a while of floating I realised I was tall enough to get out of the water, but not old enough to leave. So I sat there and I watched other waters, I watched my siblings learn to swim and just sat by the edge.
I think watching how everyone else learns to swim and comparing it against the way I learned nestled something in me. I was jealous for a while, seeing how everyone else enjoyed swimming but to me it was conserving enough energy to stay afloat. But when I looked back into my own waters, and saw my parents jumping into the pool with siblings, giving them floaties and letting them hold the railing instead, that’s when the anger started to build.
And when anger comes it doesn’t leave as easily. For me, anger raised my ears out of the water and what I thought was my lack of ability to feel, to experience love, happiness, sadness and grief turned out to be my own coping mechanism of surviving the open waters my parents threw me into, instead of the chlorinated and temperature controlled waters my younger siblings got. As I was floating, it wasn’t just my hearing that I had given up, I gave up my ability to feel and replaced it with an intellectualised from of surface level emotion.
And now sitting on the shore, with my feet facing my sea and looking back at the pool my parents now prefer, I realise I am alone. And so now when they call me over to sit amongst them, to drink some tea or share their sunscreen I realise they will never know how the hurt and the damage they put into me, as independency and critical thinking.
It’s not that I’m just different and feel emotions differently. It’s not that I grew up faster than I should. Its not that i dont think i can ever learn to trust. It’s not that I didn’t have lovely sunny days on the beach my parents gave me. The hurt I carry with me is in the waves that toppled me before I could see them coming. Its the rip tides that caught me as I tried to rejoin my parents on that shore. The hurt I carry is in the waves that I tried to use to push myself back to their shores, only to reach their backs, or their calls to keep trying, and go for more!
As I watched their backs, I think that’s when I started to learn the dynamic of the people I call my family. My father only learned to be a father, as he learnt from his failure with me. And my mother? She learnt how to be herself with me, and a mother after I didn’t need one.
Raising their first child, my father took to the only authoritative figure he knew, a teacher. And so as he raised his first child, he taught her how to grow up in the most step by step logical method he could break it down into. And as my mother raised her first child, she did so on the puppet strings of my father. And so together, as they equipped me with all the skills I would ever need to successfully pass each stage, my parents did not yet reach the understanding that a child is different to student. A child needs love, and comfort and reassurance. A child needs a place of refuge and trust she can turn to so that if swimming becomes difficult there is always a shore she is welcome to. What my parents raised was a student, they raised me without a shore and so I became the independent and critical graduate they always envisioned.
When you think about it like that, it worked. Their parenting acheived the exact result they were after. But as the child, as I grow up I pray to never become who they were to me. I hope to be a mother who slips out the words “I love you” just accidentally instead of as a reasoning clause. I hope to be a mother who gives hugs just because and not in apology for who she was. I hope to be a mother who gets into the water and never let's go until I know for sure.