My parents have not gotten along my whole life, and that is putting it very lightly. They got into screaming matches almost every day and couldn’t seem to agree on anything, from things as serious as disagreements with finances and disagreement on how we were parented, to things as trivial as how one person drove, how my mom cooked, or how my mom often forgot to close cabinets after opening them.
These fights would be the common cause of a freeze response I developed to drown out the noise through what kids those days did — video games and TV. The weekends were the worst since it was the period of time they spent the most time together in the house. It felt like the fighting and arguing would never stop — it would last all day From a very young age, I saw what my parents couldn’t see: they were not compatible, and the best thing they could do, for their own happiness, for our own well-being, and even for us as kids, was spend time apart.
People have different responses to trauma. There is fight, flight, and freeze. I often froze or tried to get as far away as possible. I thought that if I was the best-behaved kid, they wouldn’t have so much to argue about. They often argued a lot about money and spending, and so it pains me that today, my wife and I often have a lot of disagreements about money and spending. But I attribute a lot of me being frugal not only to being immigrants in poverty when I was young, but to not wanting to give anything for my parents to worry about in terms of finances.
Besides freezing, sometimes I would hover to try to get them to stop arguing and screaming. As much as I tried to distract myself, it was the only thing I could focus on. To try to get them to stop, sometimes I would hover around their room. I would knock on the door and act like I needed something when I very obviously didn’t. Sometimes that would get them to stop fighting, and sometimes it wouldn’t. A lot of the times, I would see it as my role to try to spend time with my mom and get her to feel better after one of these arguments. Keep in mind that I was seven or eight years old at the time, and I didn’t realize that that shouldn’t have been my responsibility, but it was the best I could do at the time.
In 2005, when I was eight years old, they got divorced, and for the first time in a long time, I had optimism. They weren’t going to be together anymore, and wouldn’t be yelling at each other all the time anymore. I wouldn’t have to try to freeze out the noise and try to distract myself with video games.
My mom explored the option of having us just live with her and having us move to China with her. But, as she tells it, it wasn’t a good option for us. My brother and I had very poor Chinese language skills to be able to survive in China. At that time, my brother and I spent a whole summer in China, on a trip that I thought was just visiting family. It was unbeknownst to me that this was my mom scoping out the possibility of moving us to China from the United States permanently.
It did not work out. My parents continued to live together. In 2009, they got remarried, despite the continued fighting and not getting along. It seemed like the chaos would continue.
Individually, I spend time with both of my parents alone. They are both fine people to spend time with individually, but together, it is still unbearable. I can’t tell you how poorly they talk about each other, but when the conversation doesn’t revolve around the other person, they’re fine people to be around.
A big rule among separated parents is to not talk poorly about the other parent in front of the kids. My parents never learned that lesson. My dad always talks about my mom’s lack of education and deficiencies in parenting my brother. My mom always talks about my father’s anger management problems and the deficiencies in his rural background. This happened my whole life, so I had to always choose sides at a very young age. Yes, some of this is my fault for never drawing the boundary that I don’t want to hear that stuff about one parent because I wanted to have good relationships with both of them, but unfortunately, that was not my lived experience nor the culture I grew up in.
I think my parents have a lot in common that unfortunately made them very incompatible my whole life. They are both stubborn people who always think they’re right and never admit they’re wrong. I know I have inherited the stubbornness, but maybe not the never admitting I’m wrong part. They also are too stubborn to call things quit, so for them, getting divorced in 2005 was a huge deal because it meant they had to admit defeat.
The elephant in the room is the culture we grew up in. It is better to be miserable at home and hate every second with the person you have to live with to present a facade to the world than admit defeat and get a divorce. Divorce is very taboo in Asian culture. I think that is changing and changing very fast, as divorce rates are rising rapidly in East Asia from more traditional generations, but the cultural stigma is still there. It is seen as a no-go in Confucian values surrounding harmony, order, and communalism.
As such, divorce is taboo because it is putting the needs of yourself above those of the family. Plus, in Asian culture, there’s the added element of what other people are going to say and how you are going to lose face and take a hit to your reputation if you get divorced, too. That was always a fear of my parents, and this was corroborated when I heard them talk poorly about my friends’ parents who also got divorced.
As very image-conscious people, I realize in hindsight how unique it was that my parents would fight and bicker at high volumes even when family friends were around, even when my friends were around. Sure, they probably cared that other people saw how much they hated each other, but at that point, perhaps they were exasperated and just didn’t care anymore, particularly as the years dragged on. But I would go to my friend’s houses and see that their parents seemed to always get along and have a perfectly harmonious marriage. That may not have been true, I realize that my friends’ parents just didn’t show any discord when guests were around.
As I became an adult, I realized absolutely no one has the picturesque kind of family you see in the movies. My family had a lot of problems and trauma. So do a lot of people’s, I learned. I have only shared the surface of what happened at home, on the surface, they know deep in their hearts that their lives and everyone’s lives could have been so much easier if they separated sooner. My brother had to endure witnessing the daily chaos of their marriage at a much younger age than me. I am convinced that although my brother would have had the mental health challenges he has now regardless, being in a chaotic home likely did not help.
“What about the kids?” is a common retort. Both of my parents have told me they kept living together and got married because of me and my brother. They thought it would have been much better to have both parents in the home, and it would have been much more stable. A chaotic home was still better than a divided one, as the convention goes. While that is true in a lot of cases, I don’t necessarily think it was the best for us. I would have much, much rather divided my time between them and seen them happy than not.
I am not here to give marriage advice to people in unhappy marriages with kids. After all, my wife and I have been married for a year and a half and do not have kids yet, so who am I to preach?
As a child, my happiest moments at home were not the moments of chaos, but the moments of peace. It was during my teenage years when my mom started working as a waitress and working at night. Her work schedule and my father, who worked more of a 9–5 job, never intersected. They were barely at home at the same time except for the weekends. Compared to the earlier years, this was the difference between war and peace. I stopped hearing the yelling and fighting. I could focus on my homework instead of trying to drown out what was going on on the outside through different stimuli. I felt freed. When my dad got a job in another state while we had to stay in New York, that was a relief too.
I wondered whether I was too sensitive as a kid, whether I misremembered a lot of the chaotic moments and yelling and screaming over issues as big as whether my grandparents would come to live with us, or issues as small as the kitchen cabinet my mom forgot to close. But I would be reminded of how much they truly did not get along during any forced interaction together, particularly family vacations. I often recount particular moments of our childhood with my brother, and ask “hey, do you remember this argument?” He almost always confirms, making me breathe a sigh of relief that I’m not crazy for remembering those things after all.
Vacations with family are a particularly bad time because it’s seeing my parents who now spend so much time apart finally forced to spend time together. My mom would repeat rumors in conversation, sometimes, that were simply not true, and it would make my dad irate. I always did see the same things that made my father dislike my mother as much as she did: a looseness with facts, a headstrong forcefulness that would just run you over unless you were able to push back, and flipping between erratic extremes. However, I never liked how he would respond through anger and losing his temper in arguments. I resolved never to be the same when I got older, and never thought that was the best way to respond to stress.
I am not a particularly sensitive person in all areas of my life. But I am sensitive in my marriage. That is an area of life where I don’t take criticism very well because of my conditioning. My wife and I have had to meet each other halfway in those communication styles, and have made a lot of progress. My wife and I have conflicts too, particularly around different standards of cleaning and different communication styles. None of it has ever risen to the level of thinking we’re incompatible. And we deal with these issues and talk about them rather than brushing them aside.
But I wish my parents divorced sooner. I wish they stayed divorced. I realize the issue of whether to stay married or divorced when your marriage is one of constant arguing and misery is not as easy as I am framing it. I realize that it is so much easier to say this in hindsight than it was in the moment when we were all living through the worst of it.
I realize there is no going back and no relitigating my parents’ marriage or our childhood. I realize that culture, values, and tradition, all play a factor. There are probably millions of parents who are still married and hated every second with the other person just as much as my parents did, but I don’t think that makes it right. I know plenty of friends whose parents also stayed together, then decided to finally split and get divorced the moment the kids left the house.
But my parents are getting older. They’re both in their 60s now. They have lived in America as immigrants just as long as they lived in China. I wish, for the sake of themselves, not any institutional change in status, not that they get divorced again, but that they can finally put their own happiness above that of this false and broken ideal of “staying in it for the kids.” They sacrificed enough for that ideal, and they can finally focus on themselves and have fun.
That mindset may apply to other people, but it has long not applied to us. For a long time, perhaps, fun was a foreign concept to them. But now, my dad spends a lot of time playing golf in his downtime living apart from the family. My mom, on the other hand, is a bit handicapped still trying to look after my older brother. But they have both come a long way in shifting and reframing their lives after parenting and being essentially separated except for a couple weeks during the year.
I think we turned out alright. My brother is in pharmacy school and I am working a full-time job while being in law school. However, I don’t think this was because my parents stayed together but despite it. The best thing for the whole, for harmony, for the family, would have been to split sooner. I sometimes envision and fantasize about a world where it happened. I know it is useless.
There was one day I sat in the car with my father. It was just me and him. Again, he is a very stubborn person. He would have never said this in front of my brother, in front of my mother. It was only in front of me that he felt like I wouldn’t tell anyone else in the family and that it was a safe space. It was one of the first times I saw him openly express regret. I saw him talk about how he felt like my brother’s mental health challenges and where he was in his life at that point was his fault. I saw him acknowledge how my brother having to experience and live through my parents’ tumultuous marriage for so long may have messed him up. I did not say anything, because I didn’t want to make him feel worse about himself at that moment. But silently, I agreed.
I do wonder how much of our collective generational trauma and scars all come from staying with a family unit that clearly didn’t work.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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