Day 19: your thoughts on your family
Originally posted by shade_scribbler at Day 19: your thoughts on your family
I love my family. My Mother is caring and loving and funny. My Dad is smart and strong - quirky and emotionally a little off - but he loves me and I love them both. I have a great sister. We had some trouble getting along growing up, probably the age difference, but now we get along really well. She is a great big sister and a great Mom; I hope I can be as good a Mom as she is. I like and respect Sarah (my step-mom), it was a rocky relationship at first, but now I think that liking, respect and affection are mutual. It was a hard place to start a relationship - I mean 19 year olds are terrible irrespective of the situation, and I was still pretty bitter about the divorce.
I suppose some would call mine a “broken home” - at least that is what they used to call divorced families when I was growing up. I don’t hear that term much anymore. I suppose we all have gotten used to the idea that divorce doesn’t always mean dysfunction, or maybe we have just all accepted that dysfunction is a lot more the norm than the cookie cutter, stereotypical, father-knows-best ideal. Frankly, the 1950s household seems a lot more dysfunctional to me than the one I cam from.
Not that my parents were perfect, nor was my home life. I just think no one’s home life is perfect - and actually that is probably a good thing.
The thing is, I think my parents were really good parents. Regardless of anything else I can say about my family I always knew I was loved. I also knew, very deep inside there wasn’t anything I could do that would change that. That translated into a lot of security. So even though I was picked on at school, and at times my parents fought a great deal, I still grew up feeling confident and secure. My parents also taught my sister and I a lot about responsibility, independence and self-sufficiency. I think this is incredibly important and something that seems to have gone out of vogue. My Mom worked all through my childhood, I did daycare for a while and then I was a latchkey kid (with my big sister there a few hours after me). I spent summers home alone with my sister too. Well, actually, as soon as I was transferred from daycare to staying home in the summers I spent most of them on my bicycle exploring the few blocks of the world I was permitted to venture from the house. It was enough though - it included my school and a park and a little deli that we could go buy pickles at if we saved up allowance money. I just had to be home by 5:30 to help make dinner. We act as if the world has gotten too dangerous to give children freedom, I don’t know that it is anymore dangerous. Maybe we just hear about the danger more. There is something very precious in the freedom we give kids - it teaches them to be individuals. I also very much value that I had an allowance - that I had to work for or I wouldn’t get it - that I was permitted to use in any way I saw fit. I could blow it on candy or save it up for months to buy something important to me. My parents wouldn’t hand over cash either. If you wanted extra you had to work for it, if we did a good job and we were saving for a big-ticket item my parents might elect to match what we earned. That is how I saved up to buy my very first video - The Little Mermaid (I still have it). When I got out into the world I had at least some notion of how to budget. Not that I didn’t screw up mind you, but I think I had the tools to deal with it when I did. My parents also taught us to be analytical and resourceful. They made us look up words we didn’t know, think through opinions and answers - that sort of thing.
So yeah, my parents were good parents. I do wish they had been able to model a better confrontation style in their marriage. And I do wish my Dad were not so body image crazed - Mom shielded me from a lot of it, but he is one of those men who likes skinny women and it trickled through. Mom and I had a confrontation or two about that - about fat. Long before I was really in any way fat. About the time I started to get hips and breasts, I got a bit uncomfortable with my body. I started using the word fat about myself - where do we get these ideas? What I wanted was for my Mother to say, “no, you aren’t fat, you are beautiful” but instead she would tell me that if I was uncomfortable with my weight we could work on it. She said if I watched what I ate it would even out as I grew up. One day, in the mall parking lot we had it out. I blew up as only a teenager can, and yelled that what I wanted was to be reassured not put on a diet. There were tears, and yelling (oh the teenage mother-daughter relationship) and she finally said she did think I was beautiful but she knew what it was to be a bit on the round side in the world and how they can treat you. That she wanted to protect me from that. I told her that I didn’t care what the world though; I cared what my Mom thought. She got real quiet and then she said she was sorry. She was always more supportive after that. My parents when on all sorts of crazy diets, but they stopped making me go on them with them. A few years later, when I was in high school my mother told me that she had been fat and she had been thin, that my Dad preferred her to be thin and she had done it for him, but from her point of view the only thing that changes when you lose weight is your weight. She said to me, if you want to lose weight for you ever that is fine, but don’t expect it to fix anything. The only thing that will change is your body; wise words in my opinion.
I think what it comes down to with parents, divorced or happy home is learning to forgive them for being human. We grow up with this vision in our minds that our parents are perfect, as we get older we start to fixate on their faults - the ways they have wronged us. I think when you grow up you start to realize that your parents are just people. My mom is just a woman and my dad is just a man, doing the best with what they have. They both love me, they have always done the best they knew how to do, and I just have to learn to accept them for the people they are. Much like I want them to accept me for the woman I have grown into instead of the idealized child that resided in their minds. Frankly, they are pretty stellar people, so it isn’t that hard.
I love my family. My Mother is caring and loving and funny. My Dad is smart and strong - quirky and emotionally a little off - but he loves me and I love them both. I have a great sister. We had some trouble getting along growing up, probably the age difference, but now we get along really well. She is a great big sister and a great Mom; I hope I can be as good a Mom as she is. I like and respect Sarah (my step-mom), it was a rocky relationship at first, but now I think that liking, respect and affection are mutual. It was a hard place to start a relationship - I mean 19 year olds are terrible irrespective of the situation, and I was still pretty bitter about the divorce.
I suppose some would call mine a “broken home” - at least that is what they used to call divorced families when I was growing up. I don’t hear that term much anymore. I suppose we all have gotten used to the idea that divorce doesn’t always mean dysfunction, or maybe we have just all accepted that dysfunction is a lot more the norm than the cookie cutter, stereotypical, father-knows-best ideal. Frankly, the 1950s household seems a lot more dysfunctional to me than the one I cam from.
Not that my parents were perfect, nor was my home life. I just think no one’s home life is perfect - and actually that is probably a good thing.
The thing is, I think my parents were really good parents. Regardless of anything else I can say about my family I always knew I was loved. I also knew, very deep inside there wasn’t anything I could do that would change that. That translated into a lot of security. So even though I was picked on at school, and at times my parents fought a great deal, I still grew up feeling confident and secure. My parents also taught my sister and I a lot about responsibility, independence and self-sufficiency. I think this is incredibly important and something that seems to have gone out of vogue. My Mom worked all through my childhood, I did daycare for a while and then I was a latchkey kid (with my big sister there a few hours after me). I spent summers home alone with my sister too. Well, actually, as soon as I was transferred from daycare to staying home in the summers I spent most of them on my bicycle exploring the few blocks of the world I was permitted to venture from the house. It was enough though - it included my school and a park and a little deli that we could go buy pickles at if we saved up allowance money. I just had to be home by 5:30 to help make dinner. We act as if the world has gotten too dangerous to give children freedom, I don’t know that it is anymore dangerous. Maybe we just hear about the danger more. There is something very precious in the freedom we give kids - it teaches them to be individuals. I also very much value that I had an allowance - that I had to work for or I wouldn’t get it - that I was permitted to use in any way I saw fit. I could blow it on candy or save it up for months to buy something important to me. My parents wouldn’t hand over cash either. If you wanted extra you had to work for it, if we did a good job and we were saving for a big-ticket item my parents might elect to match what we earned. That is how I saved up to buy my very first video - The Little Mermaid (I still have it). When I got out into the world I had at least some notion of how to budget. Not that I didn’t screw up mind you, but I think I had the tools to deal with it when I did. My parents also taught us to be analytical and resourceful. They made us look up words we didn’t know, think through opinions and answers - that sort of thing.
So yeah, my parents were good parents. I do wish they had been able to model a better confrontation style in their marriage. And I do wish my Dad were not so body image crazed - Mom shielded me from a lot of it, but he is one of those men who likes skinny women and it trickled through. Mom and I had a confrontation or two about that - about fat. Long before I was really in any way fat. About the time I started to get hips and breasts, I got a bit uncomfortable with my body. I started using the word fat about myself - where do we get these ideas? What I wanted was for my Mother to say, “no, you aren’t fat, you are beautiful” but instead she would tell me that if I was uncomfortable with my weight we could work on it. She said if I watched what I ate it would even out as I grew up. One day, in the mall parking lot we had it out. I blew up as only a teenager can, and yelled that what I wanted was to be reassured not put on a diet. There were tears, and yelling (oh the teenage mother-daughter relationship) and she finally said she did think I was beautiful but she knew what it was to be a bit on the round side in the world and how they can treat you. That she wanted to protect me from that. I told her that I didn’t care what the world though; I cared what my Mom thought. She got real quiet and then she said she was sorry. She was always more supportive after that. My parents when on all sorts of crazy diets, but they stopped making me go on them with them. A few years later, when I was in high school my mother told me that she had been fat and she had been thin, that my Dad preferred her to be thin and she had done it for him, but from her point of view the only thing that changes when you lose weight is your weight. She said to me, if you want to lose weight for you ever that is fine, but don’t expect it to fix anything. The only thing that will change is your body; wise words in my opinion.
I think what it comes down to with parents, divorced or happy home is learning to forgive them for being human. We grow up with this vision in our minds that our parents are perfect, as we get older we start to fixate on their faults - the ways they have wronged us. I think when you grow up you start to realize that your parents are just people. My mom is just a woman and my dad is just a man, doing the best with what they have. They both love me, they have always done the best they knew how to do, and I just have to learn to accept them for the people they are. Much like I want them to accept me for the woman I have grown into instead of the idealized child that resided in their minds. Frankly, they are pretty stellar people, so it isn’t that hard.