Parents

We strive to be nothing like our parents. 



Every child who has grown into an adult and turned into a parents drives this mantra into their head while they grow up. There are some parts to our parents' parenting that we believe are efficient and enjoyable and in turn we decide to do what they did. The other the other 80% of the time - we hate how we were raised. 

There are always things we don't agree with - mainly because it didn't work well on us with whatever method of parenting they were trying to use. Parents parent how their parents parented. It's evolutionary - it's a cycle. It takes quite a negative experience to want to stop the angry cycle. Maybe yelling and negative praise were used as a way of motivating you do to something. Maybe your parents were too nice and lenient and you think they don't care for you as much as they should. 

Everywhere we go, and almost every day, we meet people that we wish were our parents. We see other families and their interactions between their children and their parents and we feel a small pang of sorrow because we feel slightly deprived of a chance - childhood we should have or could have had. 

My parents feel that yelling and using negative feedback are a good way of getting through to me. If I had gotten an A- on a paper, they would go, "Good job, but you can do better. A- aren't enough". If I had gotten a C on anything, they told me I was a failure, and that I was irresponsible and neglectful. If I had broken something in the house, I was again, irresponsible, non-caring, disrespectful, and ungrateful. I was- excuse me, still yelled at. Even at the age of 20. After a small amount of talking to a therapist, I had come to a realization that my existence was the result of a checklist - if you will. Many a times I've heard my dad say to others that, "I've checked off my list! I grew up, I got a good job, I bought a home, I raised a child and put it through school, and now I want to retire and explore the world". 

It. He's put it through school. I don't know if my parents love each other the way I see other adults like one another. Often I feel that they married because it was just the next time in life and then they said, "what's next? Oh right, kids". 

My existence is the result of the next step in two people's lives. 

I've forced myself to be nothing like my parents. I refuse to yell and be so overbearingly opinionated, I'm more accepting and less judgmental. I don't yell because a glass of milk was spilled. I don't grumble, growl, and become stiff and edgy because of a car hitting mine. I refuse to be angry at life's random incidents and accidents. What happens is what happens and there's no use aging angrily because of it. 


Truthfully I detest the way I was raised. Don't get me wrong - I've learned some very valuable skills and lessons from my parents. However, there a lot of things that I won't carry on to my own children. My whole life has been an uphill battle against anyone who has ever told me that I couldn't do something or that I was wrong. I spend a great deal of my time educating myself so that I'm entirely self sufficient. Possibly something I learned from my own two parents. 

None of us agree with the ways we grew up. We always wish our parents were different. We wish that we were with another family, we spend hour muddling over, "if only my parents had done this, or my dad had done that, maybe if my mom cared more..etc etc."

My point to this is simply this: if you don't agree with your upbringing, if you don't agree with your family, change it. Make active choices to change. At some point you're going to grow older and have to see your family at certain times of the year, and if you don't try to make changes now while you have them around - those two or three times a year you see them won't be as cherished. My parents don't listen. It wasn't until recently when I told my father that he continued to speak to me the way he does now that I would shut him out and stop listening, or simply leave the room or the house until I felt it was right to come back. His "raised tone of voice" or yelling, as I take it is barbaric. I'm 20 years old and refuse to be spoken to like a five year old child. I'm all too quickly approaching a stage where I find it comfortable to not come home for a long time. I'm comfortable with not coming home when I'm at school for a whole year. There are a lot of times that when I come home, I find as many ways as I can to stay away from home and only go back to sleep. 

Do I feel guilty when my parents ask to go out to dinner with them and spend some time with them..? Yes. Unfortunately I still feel some raw and small care for them. When I do spend time, it ends badly. It ends up with them talking to me about my future, or the economy, my life, future plans, the welfare of the people, the news, you name it. It's never meaningless chat or banter. It's never the "how are you", "what's been going on?", "hows your friends or boyfriend..?", "what did you think of that new movie?". Any question that starts off simple ends with a discussion about my future financial security or my life insurance policy that I have to start addressing in six short years. 

I have never agreed with my parents and I never will. But I know I have to establish some sort of connection with them on some level. 

Parents are supposed to guide you through your life. They're supposed to teach you things and give you everything they never had. How they do so is entirely up to them and it can affect us in a bad way or a good. 

But we have to remember that we, ourselves will eventually shape our rest of our lives and make our own choices and we'll be under our own scrutiny and punishment. Parents have such a short amount of time to shape our lives, and then we have to spend our own time shaping and mending the rest. The goal is to grow and learn, and to look forward to the positive experiences yet to lie. We cannot and should not forget our parents and what they do and have done, but we have to grown with what we were given and that, that alone, is how we become such diverse people.