However unlike the mother bird, we are nurtured to not just survive but to also thrive. In retrospect, this brutish way of parenting can be seen as neglect or carelessness and with a coin toss my brother and I could have ended up in the wrong lane. We were lucky and took our parents way of teaching into a valuable life long lesson.
Tough Love is a paradox. How do you love someone so much and yet cause so much damage to them at the same time. It’s borderline paradoxical and yet we find ourselves on this tightrope all the time. This is something I witnessed in my parents and parent’s parents growing up. There was always brash remarks, usually on the person’s biggest flaw or insecurity and they dig. I mean really dig. How can you succeed with a personality like yours. You went to a bad school stop dreaming. Why would anyone stay with you. It’s a barrage of condescending questions and remarks that most people would walk away from. But you don’t. It’s your family, they want the best for you right? After their verbal grooming they then tend to follow up with the golden words: 为你好. It’s out of Love. It’s for you. Like those few words can justify all that was said before it but it they kind of do. We sit there, mulling, thinking that all that pain was necessary even good for us.
I’ve seen this in how my Grandparents talk to my parents and how our parents talk to us. It’s unbelievable how behavior can be mirrored down generations. My parents, while do no intend to parent like this, probably know no other way. They were able to come from a small auto town in China and make it a foreign country on their own and make it all the way up to the upper classes. Why would they change their ways? I see how they think this is the best way of parenting and it’s has its advantages. We’re resilient. We’re emotionally bulletproof. Words can’t touch us. But it’s also something that we need to be aware of or else our children will feel the same wrath. The same resentment my parents feel towards our grandparents.
Tough love. What a paradox. It is both a blessing and a curse. A mother bird teaches her young how to fly before they are ready, similarly our mom pushed us out of the nest and into the harsh realities. Having already cultivated this seemingly backwards mindset in our family, we are already conditioned to handle anything that comes our way. However unlike the mother bird, we are nurtured to not just survive but to also thrive. In retrospect, this brutish way of parenting can be seen as neglect or carelessness and with a coin toss my brother and I could have ended up in the wrong lane. We were lucky and took our parents way of teaching into a valuable life long lesson.
Our tough skin that we came to grow did not just miraculously form on its own. Through the trials and errors of childhood we’ve come to find our own vibration that paved the way for tumultuous character. Tough, is of its own theoretical beast and in learning how to ride it we’ve come to realize that tough does not mean we cannot show vulnerability, tough does not mean we cannot ask others for help, it means to own our vulnerabilities, our battle scars, our cracks and failures. It means to stay humble even when circumstances weighs over the underdog.
I can’t help but wonder about the other hundreds or even thousands of habits that we’ve picked up from our parents and ingrained into our daily lives. Whether or not those parental habits and behaviors are intentional or unconscious, they will be transferred to the next generation either showing itself evidently or it’ll be lingering like a ghost.
