Why it’s, absolutely necessary that you share these memories with your young, translated…
Because I had to choose to become an unwed mother, unavoidably, I’d needed to, explain how our family was special to Mimi Chou when she was quite young. I’d kept using “Mommy thinks that our family of two is the better option” to explain to her why she’s without a father, and in her coming of age, as she’d started becoming more aware, there’d been more questions that surfaced too, and I’d needed to, explain the details of our lives more in-depth to her too, and so, arguments, breaking up, and choices, all of these discussions entered into our mother-daughter conversations.
Although, I’d never held anything back from Mimi on the matter of love and romance, “there would be different lovers suited for us at the various stages of our lives”, I’d told her the truth as such too, but, to a young child, mother only has the role of “mother”, from before, Mimi became only interested in after I’d gotten pregnant, but as she’d entered into the elementary years, she’d gained the understandings of how people, time and spaces are changing, that there would be establishments of the various social circles, and she’d become interested in “What was mom before she was mom?”; she’d started wanting to know “what did you argue with my birthfather about?” or “who do you like more, my birthfather or one of your exes? Why?”, etc., etc., etc.
I know, that to a lot of people, these are, difficult questions: perhaps the process of breaking up wasn’t pleasant, or maybe, there are still so many scars and wounds you’re, unwilling to face yet, even the adult feeling that they’re the ones who’d done the other individual wrong, so, the involved people always carried the mindset of “it’s all water under the bridge”, or chosen to describe the process of how they broke up unemotionally, and detached.
We often carried this “linear progression” assumption about love: the two individuals may have met under the various reasons, with the time that passed, the understanding of one another grew and grew, and the successful ending must be heading toward into eternity, meaning marriage.
And that, is the weird part. We all knew, that in the fairytales, how dangerous it would be, for the Prince and the Princess to live “happily ever after’ forever, and yet, the value systems that most of us held are connected by structure, to this sort of a plot line; and loves that didn’t end in marriages, are usually considered failures.
But, for most people, the times we’d failed, greatly exceeded the times we were successful. Last year, a student who knew this belief of mine fell in love for the very first time, and chimed to me happily, “I hope we’ll be together forever!”, and this year, he’d come to me heartbroken, “Professor, I’d become, normal now”.
I was stunned for a bit, then, it’d dawned on me, although I’d empathized with his pains from losing love, I still burst out laughing.
We are so afraid of failures, sadness, defeat, anger, along with an assortment of negative emotions, so, once we were able to, walk out of the state of being heartbroken by love, we couldn’t wait, to leave the memories far behind us. But, breaking up is usually, an opportunity for us, to make ourselves see, that “This isn’t the right kind of relationship for me”, something positive.
So, parents, DO share with your young, your encounters of love! As the children voiced these questions, we the adults shouldn’t try to dodge them, instead, use the opportunity as a way, of reexamine our past selves, don’t feel stressed about not knowing how to educate your young about love or romance, the negative emotions are easily empathized with, besides, the parents also get to break away from the myths of “parents need to be perfect”, and, as you grilled your young about being fools, remembering how, you all were, once fools just like they are right now.
So, these, are the lessons that our broken hearts can teach us, but, do we want to learn? Not really, besides, it’d, taken us, long enough, to leave whoever the HELL (yes, still angered about the breakup!) it was that broke our hearts into too many bits and pieces behind, so, we do our best, to AVOID these discussions with our young, not knowing, that by sharing our experiences of losing in love, we can help our children avoid the mistakes we’d made when we were younger, after all, isn’t that what parents should be doing? To PREVENT our children from making the same mistakes we already had???