I hate to play Monopoly. I’m just not fond of how the game ends. For me, it’s not fun whether I win or lose. There’s just something about the total destruction of everyone in the game so one person can have it all that sucks all the fun out of it for me.
Or it could have been that moment in my childhood when my mother pulled me aside and told me to stop trouncing my friend in Monopoly because “it’s just not fun for your friends to lose.”
I’ve been thinking lately about how I am the sum of my past experiences and how I am a product of my upbringing in many ways. Despite being 36 years old, I seem to be just now uncovering a lot of hidden gems from my childhood and youth that shaped who I am.
I really have no idea how many times my mother told me things like the above, but I have a very vivid memory of that one time; I remember who I was playing with, where we were playing and how my mother had asked me to come into the kitchen for a moment and whispered this suggestion into my ear. I was in high school and my friend was a boy. I supposed I could have developed a complex about competing against boys but instead I developed a complex about competing against anyone in general.
I’ve never been comfortable about competing in anything. I feel kind of guilty about winning and I feel bad when I lose. It’s really not a good experience for me. Yet my mother was one of those women who managed to work as a nurse, to have a family, go to college for both bachelors and masters degrees, and eventually become VP of a company after running and reviving a number of others. You’d think she’d be the anti-50’s stereotype and yet sometimes I wonder if she didn’t struggle even more to feed me those cultural messages to make up for the fact that her family and ours weren’t the 50’s stereotype at all.
My father has always been of the mind that I should just make up my mind and not think about my troubles so he completely writes of my anxieties. He’s the kind of guy who gave up a lifetime of smoking out of the blue without telling anyone and did it successfully — just stopped and never faltered and expects everyone to be able to have similar willpower.
My parents have always pressured me to “not rock the boat” even when or especially when it involves my career. I was told to never say “no” when a boss asks me to do something and as a consequence, I worked at Winn Dixie through every hurricane crisis and one snow storm and when I had the flu — my mother would actually tell my boss I would be there when she answered the phone and I wasn’t at home to say so myself. I never called in sick to work except when I had 102° temperature and once my elementary school had to call my mother to come get me because she’d sent me to school with what they called the Asian Flu.
Don’t get me wrong, on some level, these are good work ethics, but to an extreme degree, they can be harmful. For example, I stayed at my last job for 6 years despite the abusive atmosphere and when I finally did stand up for myself and “rock the boat”, I didn’t really know how to go about it.
When I started having problems with my hands, I didn’t know I should tell anyone so I never did; I’ve been suffering from problems with my fingers when writing since elementary school and didn’t think to mention it to anyone until last year. When my dad asked me why I never brought it up before, I said, because I didn’t know it wasn’t normal, but I kind of also think it’s because I was taught from an early age not to complain about those things. I’ve also always had trouble with the bottoms of my feet hurting and it never occurred to me until it started getting worse last year to bring it up. I just didn’t know I had the option to mention it.
Culturally, I think girls are taught at a young age that we aren’t supposed to complain. It’s not ladylike. We’re supposed to suffer in silence, keep things to ourselves. Maybe that’s been changing with the last generation or two. Certainly that’s changing with blogs. However, I think early on, we were taught to not rock the boat, to blend in, to keep things to ourselves. After all, those are the safest ways to acceptance in school when children are more likely to mock each other and label one another and hurt each other with words and attitudes.
I don’t know what other messages I received from my parents. I think I received a lot of mixed messages from them. I know I was told I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up but then it was made clear to me that they would only support a career in science or engineering. They somehow managed to raise me to be so unprejudiced that I didn’t notice ethnicity until they pointed it out though they apparently did not want me to date the few black boys that showed an interest in me and told me so. I think they taught me to be generous but somehow feel guilty when someone is generous to me.
The really sad part is that I believe I’m intelligent enough to know better than how some of these hidden cultural messages make me feel, but I can’t help but react to them. It’s like they had 20-something years of brainwashing. Even now they tell me some of these things — on the phone they’ll tell me not to “rock the boat”, I get newspaper clippings in the mail about saving for retirement or emergencies, etc. It makes me more relieved that I’ve decided not to have children myself — no one to mess up myself.
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It makes me more relieved that I’ve decided not to have children myself — no one to mess up myself..
And this is why I only have one! He’s 18 now and he seems free of too much scarring on my part. It was scary enough raising one and imparting all of my limited knowledge and wisdom on him…I can’t imagine having an entire brood to be responsible for.