Fear of shadows.

Growing up I was blessed with a specific set of issues to contend with.  I’m sure we’re all born into and raised in certain circumstances that forever shape us.  My parents uprooted our family from the Philippines to America when I was 5 years old.  I was the eldest of 3 children, my younger siblings were boys, and my family was part of an ultra-conservative religion that believed only members of that religion had the chance to be saved on judgment day and everyone else would burn in hell for all eternity (more about that religion thing in a future post).  Being the eldest meant I held the most responsibilities out of all the children, being female meant I had the least freedom, and being part of a conservative religion meant I had even less freedom and a constant fear of eternal damnation in the fiery depths of hell.  All of this interwoven with being educated in the western culture that promotes freedom, outspokenness, and individuality, and you can only imagine the war of wills brewing inside me as I tried to pave my own path.  What a perfect setup for a one-way ticket to the shrink’s office, right?

Looking back at it now, I’m able to make light of my experience of being raised in an overprotective and passive aggressive household, but growing up I remember feeling suffocated and confused, similar to how I imagine an infant would feel if it was being water-boarded.  I asked myself why wasn’t I allowed to do things that other kids did?  How come every time I asked why I wasn’t allowed to do something the answer was “because I said so”?  I remember being 9 years old and purchasing a book on “How to Discipline your Children” from a book sale at school.  The cashier lady asked who I planned on giving it to.  When I answered “my mom”, she looked at me sideways and said, “Good luck with that”.  Thankfully, my mom received it gracefully, but in hindsight it just shows me how even at 9 years old I already knew something in the way I was being raised was askew.

I recall the time when I started receiving phone calls (to the house line) from my friends, sometimes I would hear my mom pick up the other line and listen in on my conversations.  It used to bother me at first, but then it eventually became a fact of life that she would hang up once she felt comfortable that A. there was a girl’s voice on the other line, B. the girl’s voice belonged to an actual girl and not a pre-pubescent boy, and C. she had previously met said girl and approved of said girl and said girl’s parents.  Later on, when I wanted to start spending time with friends during non-school hours, my mom told me that I could— as long as it was at our house or at church.  As a minor, I had absolutely no leverage with which to negotiate, and so I ended up taking a lot of my friends to my parents’ church.  Little did I know that the whole “take your friends to church” thing was a whole other ploy in itself, but I’ll reserve that for another post.

In my mid to late teens the tactics had gotten a lot cleverer.  My mom worked the night shift at a nursing home, so before she left for work she would tell me she needed to “borrow” my cell phone to make calls at work, and would return it to me the following morning before I left for school.  First of all, mom, get your own phone!  Second of all, don’t lie and tell me you need to “borrow” mine.  Third of all, after you left for work, I would just sneak downstairs to chat with my friends on AOL with the noisy-ass dial-up internet connection, so take THAT!  As her overprotectiveness and passive-aggressiveness escalated, so did my methods of defiance.  Let’s put it this way – if we liken parents protecting their child to a person holding a tiny puppy in their hands, my mom squeezed this puppy so tight that my brain was deprived of oxygen, and the end result was a mutant coyote who, for a long time, was a little bit crazy and a lotta bit resentful.  I would have appreciated more effective communication.  If I’m being disciplined, tell me why.  If it’s about trust, let me earn it.  If you’re just trying to protect me the best way you know how, thank you, but please consider my feelings throughout the process!  While my mom was the staunch disciplinarian, my father was more laissez faire.  Whenever the children needed to be disciplined, my father would tell her “Let them be.  They won’t learn if they don’t make mistakes.”  But it didn’t stop her from enforcing her iron fist.

I thought no one else knew of the tight grip my mom wielded over me until, at 18 years old, I was approached by an elderly woman from my parents’ church.  I was visibly upset that my mom didn’t allow me to go whitewater rafting with the other young people from church because there would be boys there.  The elderly woman told me “Your parents are afraid of their own shadow”.  I wasn’t sure what she meant at the time, but as I got older I started to be able to piece things together a lot more clearly.  My mom used to tell me stories from her childhood, how her parents were so strict that she resorted to paying her babysitter to lie to them and tell them she went to the movies with her friends or that she had to do a school project at a friend’s house, when the truth was she was secretly meeting up with my father.  A bunch of stories about childhood mischief, all leading up to my parents being 19 years old and forced to marry because my mom was pregnant.

After piecing all the stories together, I had a better understanding of why my mother was so overprotective, why she treated me the way she did.  She once shared with me that my grandfather told her she won’t know the heartache of having a child until her child does the same to her.  And here I am at 28 years old, the living force that threatens to fulfill my grandfather’s very prophecy daily.  While I acknowledge that my mom may have been acting in effort to prevent her traumatic past from repeating itself, it doesn’t mean I deserved to be on the receiving end of the projection of her fears.

My mother and I have had a close relationship over the years.  She was my confidante, and I shared more with her than maybe an average child should, but in the end I believe it brought us closer together.  While she disapproves of many of my life choices as an adult, I feel the strongest qualities I possess are due, in part, to her.  I am sincerely grateful for the childhood I was blessed with, however sheltered it may have been.  I was able to develop a love for solitary activities like reading, writing, singing, research, and creating things.  But I also know I want a different childhood for my own children – with more communication, more freedom, understanding, empathy.

Maybe someday when I’m old and gray I’ll come across a journal entry written by my child about their feelings on how they were raised, and only then will I truly know if I was able to give them a different childhood than mine.  Only then will I know if I lived in fear of my own shadow.