Nobody Wants to Misbehave

Translated…

Hsin-Yi is my best friend, for a very long time, we’d lost touch, that day I’d, bumped into her again, I saw that she’s very full of energy, and I’d asked her, “How’s your eldest child lately?”, Hsin-Yi opened up that everything is back to normal again.

not my comic…

Many years ago, she married, because she was pregnant, and even though her parents were against him, believed that he was too young, too unsettled, that he wasn’t going to be able to care for a family, but Hsin-Yi believed, that once they married, everything will be different, and insisted on getting married.

After she married, her husband didn’t have a stable job, plus the cost of taking care of a child is very high, they’d gotten into a ton of arguments, after she gave birth to her second daughter, the household economics got even worse; the two of them started getting physical with each other for money, in the end, leading to the divorce, and Hsin-Yi was, left, to care and raise her two children on her own.

not my photo…

Back then, the older child was in the fifth grade, the younger, in third, and, for the sake of all of their livelihoods, Hsin-Yi worked several jobs, and, neglected to spend more time with her daughters. The older daughter would often become truant, she’d even, stayed out all night long, and she’d started smoking too; after she’d gotten into middle school, she’d mixed with the dropout bunch, and sometimes, after she’d gotten drunk, she’d started ranting and going crazy by the side of the roads, and, was taken to the police subprecinct. Her behaviors made Hsin-Yi sad and there was nothing she could do, to change her daughters’ behaviors, because she couldn’t come up with the best way of action, to help change her daughter’s behaviors, to steer her back onto the right tracks.

Two years ago, late one night, I got a call from Hsin-Yi, she’d hoped that I could accompany her to the subprecinct to pick her daughter up. As we’d entered, we saw five, six middle school students, sitting there, limply at the corner, waiting on their parents. As Hsin-Yi saw how her daughter was too drunk, she’d slapped her daughter across the face twice, started crying and screaming at her, asking her WHY she just won’t, behave better? I’d hurried toward her, pulled her away from her daughter, and steadied the girl who had become, unsteady because her mother used too much force. She’d replied angrily, “Nobody wants to misbehave, but this, is the environment you gave me, to live in, that, is what had, turned me bad!”

Her words shocked Hsin-Yi, because, she did, spend too much time on work, and not shown enough care and concern toward her own daughter. And after that incident, she’d changed the way she worked, spent more time by her daughter’s side, and educated her daughter when the situations surfaced, it’d made her daughter feel her love, and thus, dissolved the misunderstanding that had, happened between them.

A lot of parents would say that their children are misbehaving, but in actuality, nobody wants to be bad, it’s just, that in the different environments, nobody tells them which is right and which is wrong.

And so, the mother learned a HUGE lesson from the daughter here, and the child here is still the innocent, because she didn’t feel the love from her mother, because her mother had to work, to provide for her, that, is why she’d not felt the love and care and concern from her parent, and, that, was why she’d joined up with that group of other children, because she felt a sense of belonging, at least, someone there cares about her enough, to spend time with her, and, after the daughter was arrested, the mother started introspecting her own behaviors, and realized, that she should be spending more time with her daughter, as her daughter is needing her, and, she’d switched her work hours, started spending more time with her child, and that, was when the teenager felt the love from her mother, and she’d changed because of the care and concern her mother is now, showing to her. That just still shows, how IMPORTANT accompanying your children is, you may think that it wouldn’t matter, but it actually does!