I think there is something very, very wrong with me. I do not love my parents. Perhaps once upon a time, I did love them and gradually the love waned away. I do not know. I haven't had any head trauma recently, or ever. Nor do I think my apathy towards my parents is an instance of teenage angst or rebellion. I do not hate my parents. I dislike them, find them tiresome and annoying, but in general, I feel nothing for them. I know this lack of feeling is not right. I feel strangely guilty and uncomfortable when I see interaction between my friends and their own parents. Like I am abnormal because I do not feel that.
My parents are not abusive or cruel or mean. I suppose that they love me— they are rather ordinary people and parental love is supposedly unconditional, after all. It’s just that I feel that they never quite understand me and don’t know how to treat me because of that-- they dislike anything they don't understand. And when they think they have me figured out—which they never really have—they must be smug and make it seem as if they have defeated me somehow. And then I must make it a point to behave in a manner contrary to their conjecture. But this cannot be a purely teenage thing—I have been this way as long as I can remember. . I am a whole different person outside of family. Superficially, I am that girl, the perfect girl—friendly, kind, caring, straight A’s without trying, piano prodigy, passably pretty, generally popular. But I feel that my personality in public is not an act, that I am genuinely that person. I just cannot be that person with my parents.
I live in a fairly stable household, punctuated by brief bouts of fighting between my parents, which is fairly normal I suppose. I remember a particularly big fight between my parents when I was around six or seven years old in Texas. The fight was so big that my mother bought a ticket to Seoul. Either that or she was just being melodramatic, as usual. My mother was sobbing and screaming and my father was trying to calm her. I feel that any other child would be crying in this situation. But I was strangely fascinated, entertained even, by the drama. It was exhilarating, exciting. I remembered reading about how Peter Hatcher’s best friend’s parents were divorced in my favorite book at the time, Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I told my mother that she should move to Vermont, because Jimmy’s mother had in the book. It is rather comical, thinking about it now, but I can’t shake the feeling that my excitement was wrong.
I remember another fight, one that has taken place within the last year. This time, my mother took the minivan and left. She did not come home for lunch or dinner. My siblings cried and crawled in bed with me while my father called my mom’s cell phone repeatedly. All that I could think of was that I would have to take the bus in the morning to school instead of having my father drive me because someone had to stay home with the kids. And that we were out of eggs and that the only thing I knew how to cook were omelets. Fights of this scale are not an ordinary part of my life. And yet I felt nothing.
In my free time, I try to calculate my parents’ expenses to raise me—braces and private music lessons included. Then I imagine becoming a successful surgeon and writing them a big check, wash my hands clean of them. I would never have to bothered with phone calls or Christmas dinners or writing phony, sentimental mush on Mother’s/Father’s Day. Not one of my friends do that.