The Disappointment Kid (Completed)

21

The simple truth of the matter is that you don't – make sense of shit like that, I mean. It started a thought process for me, though.

Running through the streets, my mind looked at the power parents have over their children, how much damage this power can cause if applied the wrong way, intentionally or unintentionally. And wasn't that the crux of the matter? My mother showed her love for me by hating me. Tough love, you might call this, and even agree with it as a pedagogical concept. 'Freaking liberals who tolerate everything, tell even the greatest loser kid they are special and that they can achieve anything', you might cry. And who am I to say what is right and what is wrong? I'm just a regular woman. No genius, no God, and I don't claim to have all the answers. Maybe the answer, like with all things, lies somewhere in the middle.

I'm no liberal; I'm no conservative or belong or represent any other party-political line. I represent my story and my truth. That's it. Your story and your truth must, by definition, be different because all lives are unique. What works for me, may not work for you at all. The best piece of advice, however, that I've ever come across where raising children is concerned was the following: Make sure your children do what you expect them to do out of love, not out of fear. Being a mother myself now (yeah, I still can't believe it myself), I focus mainly on trust and mutual respect, because there was one thing I realised that day when I was running away from my mother and my own feelings, with only very moderate success I have to admit. I realised that it wasn't only my mother's beliefs and opinions that hurt me so much. It was the disrespectful way we treated each other.

I remember that I stopped short. 'Can we be reasonable for five minutes?' my mother had said. And added, 'I don't want to fight.' My reaction, honed by years of mutual disrespect and verbal injuries, had been less than stellar. My mother might have had her faults, but I wasn't exactly perfect, either.

I have just claimed that I would be perfectly willing to go into verbal sparring with anybody, even if their opinions were uncomfortable, maybe even antiquated. But here I hadn't even given my mother the chance to say what it was that she wanted to discuss with me. I had gone into survival mode straightaway, hurling sarcasm and insults at her instead of trying to change her opinion on certain things by using tried-and-tested basic rhetorical techniques such as giving objective explanation and giving persuasive arguments which would make my listener reconsider their original attitude towards a specific problem or issue.

On closer inspection, 'Are you talking about the God of Sunday Brunch?' might sound witty, but sure as shit did not fall into this category. In fact, you might say that a statement such as this will downright antagonise your listener.

I sighed and bent over, my hands on my knees, sucking in air. Mrs Keating had once said to us that you can't change anyone but yourself and then hope for the best. I hadn't even really listened when she had said it, and I don't even recall the context in which she had felt it necessary or at least useful to enlighten us in this way. Maybe I should have paid more attention. Maybe this was the first step towards a solution. Maybe my mother and I would never find that great mother-daughter bond. Too much water had flowed under the bridge for that to happen. But maybe there was a chance for a truce between us. And maybe that truce could grow into some sort of mutual respect one day.

I straightened, a new resolve in my heart. The Shelley family's shiny surface had cracked, but I was determined to add a new shiny coat of paint, more flexible and more durable this time.