With several deep breaths, I continue.
If only I knew how deep breathing and mindfulness could transform my life, I would have used it at 17 when all felt like it was a failure before I even started. Through these moments, I just have visions of my parents.
Simple and conservative Indian parents who loved their children and wanted so much for us and just supported us through everything. We may have grown up in Durban, South Africa, but our values have travelled down through generations of men and women who broke their backs on the sugar cane fields from the 1860s in Port Natal and even further back as farmers in Allahabad, India and beyond.
They carried their heritage and their religion like lifelines; taught us their learnings as if injecting them into our bloodstream like a much-needed drug that coursed through our veins, giving us an important part of our drive and yearning to succeed. We were and still remain the hope of our ancestors, realised and never satisfied - good enough was never enough. It's what I remember the most as a child. I must want more for myself than even I think I am capable of. It was probably one of the reasons so many of us find ourselves lost and confused as we get older.
Writing this, I begin to feel so much compassion for my parents and their parents. If this is all they knew, it sounds so exhausting. It sounds like so much of driving, directing and pushing a narrative through each generation; shoving this edict of perfection with the strength of the thousands that came before them. How utterly painful to be part of a generational inheritance that has its basis in never being enough.
This is where I find myself in a quandary about the right way to raise children and instil the importance of having a drive and also raising them with a loving guiding hand. My parents worked their asses off to get us educated and up and away. However, this type of hyper-focus on results and success is what also causes much dissension between parents and children of my generation when those children become adults.
Parents feel they did a great job of raising their children to be productive adults. The truth is they did - they did what they knew from their parents. However, this quote made me realise why I felt the separation and conflict of loving and, at times wondering, if I liked my parents, "What goes unsaid―or what cannot be remembered―can have profound consequences that may be affecting you to this day."
We don't know why we feel some of the things we do and why it makes our relationship with our parents, as adult children, one that is fraught with conflicting emotions of love and duty and, at times, dislike.
