Remembering girlhood and time on the edge of seventeen- I
What had happened to me can’t be erased or undone, but I can change my perception of it and no longer hold it against my future. I realized that the marks and imprints of my past are still present and affecting my current state and adult life. So here I’m, after much consideration, having decided to write down my experience openly and honestly. But I don’t yet have enough courage to describe in detail the worst experience I’ve ever gone through in my early adolescence. What I can write about is my major depressive episode as a teenager and a glimpse of my earliest years.
In certain ways, I wasn’t a normal child. Before my grandmother frightened me by telling me that ghosts haunted and were trapped in the mirror, I used to stare very intently at my reflection in a mirror in a nearly dark hallway. Up until the age of nine, I always fell asleep with my teddy bear by my side. I used to treat my teddy bear as if it were a living being, or more like a mother tending to a child. To me, Teddy was my child, and I daintily told others “I am a mother”. When I was a child, I often thought and wished that if it had been possible to bring and carry toys from outside, I would’ve gone to kindergarten every day with my Teddy. He was hand-made by a distant relative, who stitched it as part of her sewing workshop assignment using old denim. I don’t remember how old I was when, during a rare visit with my family, I saw my Teddy and wanted to take it with me right away, and without hesitation, she gifted it to me. His eyes were restored once by my mother; he had just plain black button eyes, but one of them split open at the seam, and she replaced them with nice pearly white button eyes. I kept my Teddy, which is, I believe, still in my home. You might be perplexed by my use of gender pronouns. My Teddy was plain, unlike many stuffed animals that have gender-specific elements like hair clips or clothing. Perhaps because my Teddy was blue, I attributed a male gender to it.
I was raised by both of my parents, who managed to keep our family together in spite of their marital issues. There were times when my parents engaged in dysfunctional confrontations and displayed hostility toward each other. At some point in my childhood, I truly resented my father and wished for his death because of his actions and unfaithfulness to my mother. He was and is still quite a patriarchal man who used to say very often, “I’m the only person who has earnings, carrying the responsibility of supporting a family on my back”. At this point, his words sounded like manipulation or gaslighting. Sometimes I think my mother married the wrong person — someone who doesn’t think love should be mutual — because my mother provides care and attention generously without demanding return, but when she needs it, he should give it back. I think unrequited love exists except in marriage. Even though she spent most of her prolific and productive years as a housewife, she has a graduate degree, speaks fluent Russian, and is communicative in Japanese. Because of my parents’ interactions with each other and my mother’s situation, I decided at a very young age to be different from my mother, independent, and strong, and to tie a knot at a later age than theirs. My mother is a strong woman who just conceived unplanned twin daughters and gave birth when both of them were not mature and financially secure enough. The undeniable truth is that I’m an integration of them, albeit not the best version, because I took mostly their negative traits, my mother’s pessimism and ignorance (sometimes disguised as high resistance) for sure, and maybe his self-regarding and demanding behavior. But I strive to be an inspirational big sister, to miracle in my life, and to just be a good person.
Yet my father was the one to whom I had the strongest attachment during my early years, and I hold his opinion and words close to my heart. He is the one who tried his best and is doing far better than his father. He often says we should take it as an obligation to strive to be better people than them, do what they couldn’t, and explore and level up. One of his pieces of advice is to not make obtaining property or cars your core life value and spend your whole life chasing them. He is the one who endorses the pursuit of knowledge and says to make it your top priority because life is a never-ending learning journey and high intelligence is the biggest asset that no one can steal from you. Therefore, I want to grab experience, knowledge, and wisdom in every phase and stage of my life and, with each passing year, become wiser and a bit better than the younger me. I don’t remember the precise words, but it is true that the only thing that can destroy any promising person’s chances of success is a loss of cognitive function. I was a daddy’s girl since he took up the duty of nursing me, who suckles and changes diapers most of the time. My dad knows the profundity of the value of learning, and both of my parents are good enough. I know both of their backgrounds and childhood stories; either of them experienced difficulties, although, except for their harsh comments, my parents were not physically abusive. My father had an abusive and alcoholic father who often banished his wife and his two sons during the freezing winter months. My father told me he promised himself to be a good and better father than his own at a young age. Not everyone who was raised by an addict or violent household becomes the same as the abusers; one of the examples is my father. If he had a good enough father figure, he would probably be much more caring and attentive, the same as my mother, who lost her mother at twelve. Writer Arthur C. Clark beautifully put my father’s words.
“In my life I have found two things of priceless worth — learning and loving. Nothing else — not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake — can possibly have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say ‘I have learned’ and ‘I have loved,’ you will also be able to say ‘I have been happy.”
Arthur C. Clarke — Gentry Lee, 2012.
I appreciate and am sincerely thankful for both of my parents’ care and the sacrifices they made, especially my beloved mother, who sublimated and devoted all her young years to raising us and my father. I know she pawned most of the jewelry she had inherited from her mother to buy me baby formula, and she couldn’t redeem it. She must have been torn apart many times when she couldn’t get it back and lost her mother’s precious golden necklaces, rings, and earrings. If they were successful with contraception and family planning, my mother wouldn’t say that bringing three daughters into the world was the only thing she had achieved in her life. Her sacrifices and sentiments give me stimulation to make her proud that she didn’t waste her young years for nothing. At this age, I stopped thinking of myself as a mistake or an unintentional child or thinking that it would be better if she hadn’t kept us. I finally reached an age when my mother gave birth to me and my twin last month as a child-free person, and I’m following a different path from both of my parents. Unlike my father, she could have grumbled that she sold her mother’s belongings to make ends meet or feed me. She asserts that she followed the correct course of action and that she was thankful for my grandma, who was aware that the jewelry she had collected would one day provide her children with much-needed financial support. We all have the power to be forces for goodness or evil, and we all exert impacts, both consciously and unconsciously. In contrast to my natural pessimism, I endeavor to harmonize my inner pessimism with some romanticism and optimism.
