Isn’t your family supposed to be your backbone? I always thought that a family is your armor that can withstand any blow that may come your way. However in reality, there is a huge generation gap between our parents and us.
I am not sharing my story to gain attention or sympathy or demonize my parents but I want to share how it feels when your father has anger issues and would humiliate you but your mother would shrug it off by using his busy routine as an excuse. How taking to your father feels like preparing for a war because you never know how he would react.
The lack of awareness regarding importance of mental health has taken a toll on a lot of middle class families that no one acknowledges. The family member who the whole family is dependent on, should be more soft spoken and understanding and not at a constant boiling point. But that’s not even the worst part. Complaining about those issues to your elders always ends up with a long lecture. Sharing it with fellows feels like talking about the weather because they would mostly share the same stories about their fathers. It’s just now that I have started to see a pattern in all this chaos. It was the lack of communication with their own parents that has clung to them all their life.
It is important that hope, trust and support are embedded in the crystal of your family relationships. Your own family shouldn’t make you feel incompetent and worthless. Not even intentionally. None of it can heal the acid that your anger has poured all these years. I have developed anxiety that I didn’t even know existed until I started searching my symptoms on the internet. Now I am scared of trying new things so I am more of a follower and not a leader. I don’t know who to blame for it; my father’s anger issues, my mother’s ignorance towards his attitude or the lack of awareness in the entire society.
What I fear most is that I may be one of the many affected children that will never be acknowledged for what they have gone through. I hope to create awareness about this so that no one else ever has to face all this alone.
The author Manal Bajwa is a student of biotechnology. She is striving to find opportunities that can help her make this world a better place.