How it feels when you see your parents not get along
Childhood, disrupted
My generation fears marriage and love. Look at us, we fear even saying ‘relationship’. We have found a comfortable resting space in the grey intersection of no labels and situationships.
We are just friends.
I mean if I were to say it aloud, I would have to accept the responsibilities that come with it. Not just that, I would have to put myself in a vulnerable spot. Oh, to have everyone know that I have gotten hurt at the hands of a silly boy. Terrible.
This inability to love and accept love is obviously rooted in our subjective experiences and especially in what we perceive of our parents’ relationship.
Listed below are peculiar feelings that were incredibly thought-provoking and upsetting.
I don’t know if they are relatable. I hope they aren’t but if they are, you can remind yourself that you’re not the only one. Why does the feeling of camaraderie in sorrow bring so much respite? It is painful to be going through sad things, but it is less painful when everyone is going through the same sad things. Let me suffer in a group, always. Never alone.
We cannot blame our parents for everything that is wrong with us. At some point, we will have to own this damage, reverse this damage, or at least live with this damage with reduced resentment.
“I worry about my mother’s safety when she is alone with my father.”
When I heard this, a lump the size of an orange formed in my throat. To feel that either of your parents is unsafe when they are with each other goes to show how volatile that relationship seems to the child. A deep-seated discomfort becomes a state of mind. Anyone, just anyone around them would stop them from behaving ruthlessly towards each other because they care about what everyone else thinks of them. Not what they think of each other
“I don’t open my room’s door when I hear people screaming. Sometimes it’s the TV, other times it’s them. I just feel my heart sink.”
“I feel invisible.”
“It feels like they don’t care about what I think of them. Sometimes they say horrible things about each other to me. How do I tell them that it makes me feel terrible to hear such things about my own parents from my own parents?”
“Why can’t you just separate? You hate each other and frankly looking at both of you makes me want to cry.”
I had the terrible misfortune of witnessing a couple arguing in a cafe near my house. Their five-year-old climbed up the sofa, and the table unaware of the intensity of the conversation.
They were arguing about the husband’s drinking habit. He (the husband) cracks open a cold one every evening without the boys and she (the wife) doesn’t like that about him. That’s fair. I apologize for eavesdropping but everyone in the cafe knows this about him. They were soon joined by a man who was the mediator. The mediator ordered a beer for himself, quite ironically.
The wife told the mediator that she doesn’t want the son to pick up this drinking habit. The mediator concurred sipping his beer while the son continued to climb onto sofas, chairs, and windowsills.
To prove her point, she called out to the son and asked him diligently,
“Do you want to be like your dad or like Ayaan’s dad?”
Sorry, what?
“Hmm. Ayaan’s dad! He plays catch-catch with us.”
“See, I told you. I don’t know how he is not ashamed of this. Your own son doesn’t look up to you.”
If you ask me, being a role model for your children is an unfair expectation. Your child’s abilities do not have to be dictated by your abilities or inabilities. Your resources may enable them, but your professional success (or failure) does not define theirs. Your responsibility is limited to their value systems. Your successes or failures don’t make you a bad parent. Lying to your child about them does.
“I think it’s my fault.”
So many people I spoke to think that their parents fight because of them. It is an enormous burden to carry for a child. Fights often happen over disagreements on the right ways to bring up children, which are very fair. Even conflicts are fair but with aggressive parents, they take on a different meaning because the conflict transpires into a conversation about separation. These parents often gobble their children's mental peace by expecting them to take sides.
“My relationship with my parents is independent of their relationship with each other.”
As mundane as this sounds, I have found this thought to be extremely ground-breaking. It sounds a bit heartless. It also sounds like the child must relinquish all ideas of personal justice and sit in that complacent spot of neutrality, but it is so freeing to think that our parents’ relationship is not in our hands to protect.
I don’t know to whom I am writing. Am I writing to myself? Am I writing to my children? Am I writing to the countless other kids who sit in silence thinking about the fight they witnessed at home? Am I writing to the people who are convinced that marriages are a long route of suffering? Am I writing to the people who think romantic love is in fact a theory only enjoyed in a work of fiction for it can never and will never exist in the vagaries of this unpredictable and cruel place we shamelessly call home?
It is not the existence of conflict but the path to its resolution that matters. There is nothing profound about this, but it is traumatic — to see your parents curse the living hell out of each other. We lie about them so often to everyone because it plays such a pivotal role in our perception of ourselves.
I often ask myself, what I am going to do with so much anger and resentment. And the answer is always,
“Hehe!”
