I guess my friends will find this funny, because I have been constantly battling with my parents for as long as anybody can remember. The wrath and degree of control my parents exert has practically become the stuff of legends to my friends by now. In fact for as long as I myself can remember, I have, for my whole short life so far, harboured an excessive amount of anger towards my parents. It's not been an easy 20 years on either side. With the three of us having extremely volatile tempers and stubborn personalities, it's a wonder (and sometimes a blessing) that my sister is the type to hold her anger in.
So anyway, cliched as this may be, I think that many people (including myself) have always failed to understand that our parents are human too. God, it does sound ridiculously cliched. Let me explain. Why do we fight with our parents? More or less, the answer is that we disagree on certain sentiments because of our different personalities. Being merely human, we are all flawed in some ways, some more so than others. But that's okay. We forgive ourselves, our friends and even complete strangers for not being perfect: "oh, to err is human", "nobody's perfect". Yet, we cannot find it within ourselves to comprehend and forgive our parents at the same time. Forgiveness implies that the one doing the forgiving was right in the first place and in a parent-child relationship, it only seems natural for parents to forgive their children's transgressions but never vice versa. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the fact that we could, at times, be better, smarter, more right than our parents. Or perhaps we still hold onto the notion that our parents are always right (however subconsciously). Or even perhaps some might feel uncomfortable having to 'forgive' our elders, attaching to it the connotations of a warped sense of self-gratification at triumphing over those who are older and wiser than us. Personally though, I feel that we must realize: forgiveness has nothing to do with yourself and everything to do with the person you are forgiving. And technically, one does not forgive a person but a person's traits or actions/words. What I'm trying to get at is that forgiveness is not bestowed from a lofty, 'holier than thou' position, regardless if this person is figuratively in a 'higher' position than you. You do not elevate yourself above them but instead, you pull them off their pedestals and seriously examine them on a basic level as a fellow human being. In any case, forgiveness is the second step. The first one is understanding.
Maybe there are people, like me when I was younger, who assumed that the phrase of "oh your parents are only human, you must learn to understand them more" meant that my parents are also prone to being angry, tired, having a long and annoying day at work and therefore is highly irritable. Those are all true, of course. Yet, what we don't often examine is the side that not many people want to see. That our parents could be angry and irritable not only because of a long, tiring day but because they may be people with ridiculously short tempers. They are quick to anger. They are unreasonable. They are narrow-minded. The list is endless, as is the list of sins stemming from our fault of being 'merely' human. These aren't particularly terrible traits. Many of us possess one or more of these traits ourselves. So is it really so hard to imagine that our parents, the people who passed their genes onto us, can have these characteristics too? And if we can forgive ourselves so readily for being 'merely' human, why do we hold our parents so much at fault for being like us too? As we grow older, we realize that our parents aren't perfect. However, there seems to be a gap between realizing and understanding. We may realize, but we do not understand the implications of our realization. And in failing to do that, our attitudes will forever remain clouded and narrow. It wasn't so difficult for myself to realize that my parents weren't perfect. What took me a lot longer was the understanding part that hey, it's okay that my parents have these flaws that I dislike. And I can't stress this part enough. Because I went through a very angry, though thankfully short, phase at being bitterly disappointed at my parents for not being as morally righteous as I was. Or open minded, or whatever. It was very hard for me to accept this at first because there are certain values that I hold very dearly onto and I was just unable to back down from my stand that others should believe in these ideals too. However, I guess it occurred to me after one too many times of feeling disappointed that I can't blame my parents for not being a certain way. If I don't blame my friends for not being like that, I figured that I can't blame my parents too, nor anyone else. And that's when I fully realized the extent to which we are blinded by the current lines dividing the roles of parent and child. As we grow older, we expect our parents to treat us like adults. But do we treat them like the adults they deserve to be treated too? Kids (of all ages, may I add), can we ever look beyond the pigeon-holed labels of 'Mom' and "Dad' and actually treat them with the respect and consideration that all human beings deserve?
Our parents may be lots of things. Some positive, some negative. From what I've heard, they can be bigoted, selfish, narrow-minded, racist, chauvinistic, tyrannical, unreasonable and sometimes just plain mean. But so can we. So what gives us this moral high ground to judge them by? Their age? Wisdom? Life experiences? Surely these factors do not make them (or us) into perfect people. And if we can find it in our hearts to forgive them, there'll be a lot less hate in the world. Because seriously, "I hate my parents" is no longer an acceptable form of talking about one's parents the older one gets.
I'm not advocating for a drastic change like some crazy parent-child role-reversal situation. Nor am I asking for parents to treat children as their friends and for children to absolve their parents of all faults. I just think that it'll be good to see how terribly flawed we all are as human beings, and to maybe show some understanding to the people who perhaps need it the most, our parents. It may not be much, like I'm pretty sure the relationship between me and my dad won't be all that different, but at least it removes some of the hate and anger from the equation. I guess that's a good start.
- Wen Zhen
