and what it truly means.
I contemplated on not going to college because I wanted to be free. At 16, I wanted to get a job so I can leave the house and live away from the noise, the rules, the endless criticisms and guilt of being a dependent in my parent’s household. My teenage confusion and my parents’ conventional, small town ideas did not really mix well.
But I didn’t and had thoughts of suicide. For peace of mind.
Then I had a kid and got married, got myself a job that pays the rent and I started, though gradually, embracing the thought of actually leading my own life. I’ve always thought that money—a stable flow of money—is all that it takes to get a life.
I’ve got a place that I do not have the right to anything. I cannot even decide who should live in it. Or what my mother should or should not put in it. my mother turns it into a warehouse and I am not supposed to complain about how her garbage takes up so much living space and how it encourages the rats and cockroach to breed twice as much as they ordinarily would, because that would make me a very difficult, unsupportive daughter. And having to live with my mother’s garbage is not even enough to repay all the money she spent on me. In a Filipino family, only a daughter’s life can pay for all the hardships her parents went through raising her. I never knew how true it was until this time. There are days when I feel it’s too late. I’m done. I’ll forever be my mother’s slave.
Buying a house of my own is one possible option I was given, but it came with a condition that the house must be big enough to accommodate my mother, my father, my unmarried siblings and my mother’s garbage. And my own family. Or I can just tell my kid and my husband to get a tent and camp at the garage. It would be a decade more before I could afford something spacious enough to fit all those. Because if I get anything less I become an ungrateful daughter who prefer to abandon her parents and siblings in need. Honestly, a nagging, screaming mother is the last thing anybody in the world wants.
And because as family, my mother said, we have to stick together until death.
What if my husband’s parents demand the same? What do i do? Cut myself in half? Lengthwise or transverse-wise? I wonder.
I’ve got a son I can’t even help plan a future on. HELP PLAN, take note, NOT DECIDE. I think it is the saddest and most tragic thing an old parent could do to a daughter with a family of her own—decide on his/her grandkid’s future on his/her own. Or concluding on her/his own that she/he has a better way of raising her/his grandkid. It is even more tragic if the grandparent was treated the same way by her/his own mother or in-laws years before.
I guess history really does love to repeat itself. It’s like it has a default factory defect. Whatever factory produces this history repeater should start closing down, otherwise it will just repeat one mistake after another. Imagine having a history gattling gun. Could you?
I planned on ending this family tradition in my time and give my kid the freedom that he deserves because I DO NOT OWN HIM. and so should ALL parents to their kid.
But how could I give? I do not even have it.
I contemplated on not going to college because I wanted to be free. At 16, I wanted to get a job so I can leave the house and live away from the noise, the rules, the endless criticisms and guilt of being a dependent in my parent’s household. My teenage confusion and my parents’ conventional, small town ideas did not really mix well.
But I didn’t and had thoughts of suicide. For peace of mind.
Then I had a kid and got married, got myself a job that pays the rent and I started, though gradually, embracing the thought of actually leading my own life. I’ve always thought that money—a stable flow of money—is all that it takes to get a life.
I’ve got a place that I do not have the right to anything. I cannot even decide who should live in it. Or what my mother should or should not put in it. my mother turns it into a warehouse and I am not supposed to complain about how her garbage takes up so much living space and how it encourages the rats and cockroach to breed twice as much as they ordinarily would, because that would make me a very difficult, unsupportive daughter. And having to live with my mother’s garbage is not even enough to repay all the money she spent on me. In a Filipino family, only a daughter’s life can pay for all the hardships her parents went through raising her. I never knew how true it was until this time. There are days when I feel it’s too late. I’m done. I’ll forever be my mother’s slave.
Buying a house of my own is one possible option I was given, but it came with a condition that the house must be big enough to accommodate my mother, my father, my unmarried siblings and my mother’s garbage. And my own family. Or I can just tell my kid and my husband to get a tent and camp at the garage. It would be a decade more before I could afford something spacious enough to fit all those. Because if I get anything less I become an ungrateful daughter who prefer to abandon her parents and siblings in need. Honestly, a nagging, screaming mother is the last thing anybody in the world wants.
And because as family, my mother said, we have to stick together until death.
What if my husband’s parents demand the same? What do i do? Cut myself in half? Lengthwise or transverse-wise? I wonder.
I’ve got a son I can’t even help plan a future on. HELP PLAN, take note, NOT DECIDE. I think it is the saddest and most tragic thing an old parent could do to a daughter with a family of her own—decide on his/her grandkid’s future on his/her own. Or concluding on her/his own that she/he has a better way of raising her/his grandkid. It is even more tragic if the grandparent was treated the same way by her/his own mother or in-laws years before.
I guess history really does love to repeat itself. It’s like it has a default factory defect. Whatever factory produces this history repeater should start closing down, otherwise it will just repeat one mistake after another. Imagine having a history gattling gun. Could you?
I planned on ending this family tradition in my time and give my kid the freedom that he deserves because I DO NOT OWN HIM. and so should ALL parents to their kid.
But how could I give? I do not even have it.
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