Parents should always be supportive and helpful no matter what their kids choose to do with their lives, or at least that's my understanding of parenthood. People make different decisions. Those decisions sometimes make their parents proud, sometimes worried, and sometimes disappointed. Looking at my life and my decisions, I usually ask myself how my parents are feeling about me and my life.
My mom used to spend hours and hours of her day in the kitchen for cooking meals. My dad would be in the middle of the living room and spent hours and hours of his evening reading books. I was little and I was so in love with the food my mom cooked. She was and still is an amazing cook. I was little and I couldn't read and write yet, but I loved to just lay down beside my dad and watch him reading. Between staying in the kitchen or the living room, I always had a very difficult decision to make as a kid.
My dad always wanted us to study hard, go to university and find a well-paying job. He wanted us to be perfect in his own way. My mom always wanted us - my sister and I - to be a great cook like her, know sewing, know all the cleaning techniques, know how to take care of plants, to keep our closets neat and tidy. She wanted us to be perfect in her own way. Here comes the difficult decision again: between my mom's preferred lifestyle and my dad's, I was so confused that I did not think I could have a little bit of everything and make them both happy and proud of myself.
My sister was painting, she was reading poems and memorizing them, sometimes she was writing poems herself. My sister had too many friends, unlike me. When she was hanging out with her friends, I used to imagine my bed as a boat. I was all alone with myself in an ocean and I had to find a way to survive. My friend was my white and green stuffed panda!
My sister went to university, as my father liked, but she got married very soon and then became a mother herself. We were sharing a bedroom in my parents' house. When she left, I just felt lonelier in my imaginary ocean.
My brother is the only boy in our family. Traditional families in my home country like and value boys more than girls. My mom is kind of traditional. Not that I am jealous of him, but sometimes when I was younger, I wished I was a boy.
My brother started working when he finished high school. He decided not to go to university. He is successful at what he is doing, but that is not what my dad wanted. I never could relate to my brother very much. It seems we belong to two different worlds. He is more religious than me and the rest of us. From having endless and pointless discussions about everything, I slowly came to this understanding that he sees things differently. I started to learn that being siblings does not mean we have to think in the same way and live the same life.
I've always been a very good student. That was making my dad happy. As soon as I learned our own alphabet and became capable of reading and writing, he registered me for an after-school class to learn English. He was bright and I should thank him to force me learning and practicing English from a very young age.
But did he see me living somewhere so far from them? Absolutely not! That was not his wish and I was not dreaming about living somewhere else until my twenties. Yes, I wanted to go to university, not just because of my father but because I wanted to grow, gain experience, and learn new things, and going to a university was the only option at the time.
Attending university changed a lot of things in my life.
I met my husband; in fact, he was my classmate. I decided - or I should say we got married and decided - to leave our home country. I did not become the woman my mom wanted. I did not know how to cook until I got married. I don't know how to use the beast called the sewing machine and I am not always in the mood for cleaning and doing laundry as she was doing it every single day.
Maybe I am the woman my dad wanted - a hard-working, confident one.
Nowadays, however, I am asking myself: am I the woman I wanted to be?
