Your Relationship with your Parents

Originally Posted by Hiiragi

Firstly, I'm chinese. That said, it's pretty much self-explainatory.

Until I'm off to college, it's nothing but bitching about hard-working, straight A's, and forcing me to consume home brewed soup ensured to increase longevity after dinner everyday. IMHO, however, I can see how they will seem to be "those great parents" when, they actually aren't there to bitch at me. But right now, ugh.

Sigh . . . I know how it is. I'm Vietnamese so the parents are always after me about marks and stuff . . . This is prob why my relationship with the parents have suffered over the years. Trying to please the parents is so damned hard sometimes . . . Whenever I get bad marks, my parents gets into an argument with me . . . I never really get anything in the way of positive encouragement from them. It's mostly the "you're so damn stupid" and "why don't you use your fucking head?"

That being said, they do provide food and a roof over my head. So I'm grateful for that . . . but there's not really any closeness between us. It's really more of a stalemate than anything else.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Lady Miyomi

Wow, how do you deal with all that negativity, especially from your parents?

I'm just slightly more than a year late replying to Lady Miyomi. Just a year. And a month.

Anyway, dealing with the negativity was quite hard. I became scared to present my marks to my parents. I would either fake them or just not mention the tests since they would conveniently forget. As I grew more scared, my stress levels would increase. My marks steadily decreased from Grade 7 onwards, which was the first year when I wasn't the best in the class.

I considered myself a failure for not being able to meet their expectations. The constant feeling of failure seeped into my thinking. Whenever I got a good mark, it was because of chance. Not because I knew the material well. This was my way of thinking throughout all of high school and most of university. My girlfriend broke me out of it. It took her most of university's second year but she made me compete against my own expectations rather than my parents.

My relationship with parents right now is neutral. It's not worth the physical or emotional effort to argue with them. The only time I'll argue is to defend my younger sister against their way of thinking. After a marks related argument between her and the parents where they went after her head for an hour, she went off muttering "I want to kill myself." I was the only one to take it seriously and try to comfort her.

There's nowhere I can't reach.