Quote:
Originally Posted by aishah
i can definitely relate to the escapism in childhood. i absolutely hated being - well - everything that i am when i was a kid. i wanted to grow up and be june cleaver. i went to a catholic school where about 98% of the student population was white and upper class and the parents lived in the rich section of town and a lot of the moms were like june cleaver. i used to fantasize about having a totally different life. i was ashamed of my family and the house we lived in. i was ashamed that my mom worked a lot and didn't wear heels or makeup and that most of my family members were/are fat, dark skinned, poor, and disabled.
in some ways, fantasizing helped me escape and was a coping mechanism for dealing with trauma and poverty. in other ways, it was a really negative thing because being ashamed of who i was and who my family was led to a lot of internalized oppression and self-loathing (and an eating disorder that wrecked my body, among other things). and eventually i grew up and i realized that even if i really wanted that ideal, it would be impossible for me to achieve. i realized that that ideal was fed to me for really specific (and oppressive) reasons.
now i am proud of the things i used to be ashamed of. and i am ashamed that when i was a kid i used to wish my mom was june cleaver. because my mom was a strong, brilliant, amazing woman. she was far from perfect and i have hella family issues and childhood trauma and shit. but now i am sad that i felt that way as a kid and i wish i had realized and valued myself and the women in my family and the community that i come from sooner.
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My mother and I have a cultural clash, it's of EPIC proportions, she's a very conservative catholic latina woman, ruler of her roost to the point of being cruel. We didn't watch a lot of TV my mother monitored the shit out of that, I had to "sneak" watching it. I was well into my teens when I learned about the Cleavers and other shows like that.
My mother who was an immigrant and hid a lot during our childhood (we were undocumented till I was in 5th grade) spent more time policing and making sure her kids had the values (her words) that were part of our culture. It was maddening to me as a child to understand why this woman was so fucking stuck on stuff that seemed so Mexican.
We were so fucking Mexican I would sometimes be ashamed of my lunches because they were different, I hadn't experienced this when I was younger because my parents sent me to school in a predominantly Latino Catholic school so I was surrounded by kids going through similar family structures.
I didn't want my Ma to be like a TV mom, but I did want her to be not so Mexican, she would be so hurt when I would say this, it was a struggle for us both being she was from Mexico and I was too but I was being raised as a Chicana would.
I sometimes hug my mom tightly and apologize for being so harsh with my words as a teen age punk, and I understand now that our battles were cultural, about unspoken abuse in immigrant families, educational. I know and hear stuff that my mother has endured, as a woman, as a Mexican and I am like fuck, what a brat I was and at the same time wish I could of helped her find help sooner to help her cope with so much that it couldn't but bleed into our upbringing...
The women in my family are amazing, yet so so different than the women who were and are raised in an American society.