Living Up to Your Parents Expectations

My mom and I in 2007

Often times parents raise their children so that they can be better than they were and have a better life. We as children don't have the opportunity to choose our parents or even decide how we will be raised. As a child my mom would always warn me to do better than she did and not make the same mistakes.

Hearing that so often made me feel as if whatever I was doing wasn't good enough. I got good grades in school but did she want great? l worked several jobs but should there have been more? I helped With my sisters but was I not good role model? Those were the thoughts I had as a kid. Not so much my thoughts now, Now, I try my hardest to give my sisters advice that they can use and learn from my experiences. Usually they don't listen but i still try,

My mom was a single parent of four girls and started having children at a very young age. That is something I will always respect her for, because to this day I have no clue how she put up with me and my sisters. As the oldest sister I had a lot of responsibility and many times I felt that I wouldn't live up to the standards that she had for me. Most times I would get "The Talk" from my mom I would sit and think, "How in the world am I going to keep up with all these thing?" In the same mindset I would try to figure out how I can live up to my own expectations. At one point I just gave in and forgot about what I wanted in life.

Now, as an adult I still wonder if I am living up to my mothers expectations. Although I have never asked her what she expects from me, I wonder if I am where she dreamed of. I make it a point to keep in mind if my mom would be happy with decisions that I make. I'm not saying that I have never done anything that will make her unhappy but I still think about how she will feel.

I find it very difficult to balance pleasing your parents and pleasing yourself. I find it even harder to choose between the two. Now, in my life I am learning to choose my happiness over others, even my parents. It's not that I don't want to please my mother it's just that I know if I am not happy within myself I can be happy for others around me. Everything that I do has to be for the benefit for me and the life that I live. The life that I am not only living for myself but also my future family.

Living up to your parents expectations can be scary but I believe it takes a strong person to stand up those expectations when they don't fit into their life. If a parents respects their child and the growth that they will experience they will respect that resistance and support them.

One thing that I love abut my mom is that she has always supported me, even when she didn't agree with that my decision was. We don't always agree but we always make a way to understand where each other is coming from. 

Lazy Eyes and Such

When I was younger I had a lazy eye. I know that’s not the first thing that someone normally says when they first meet, but I think that it’s a good conversation starter.

The first time that I realized I had a lazy eye is when I was about 5 years old. My mom told me that I wasn’t born with it, it just happened as I got older. But the story that I am told is that when I was a child I would sit really close to the television. My mother would always say, “Nikki, you’re sitting too close to the TV, move back some.” I would soon reply, “Mama I can’t see.” I of course didn’t know what the problem was, but all I know is that soon after that incident I was in the eye doctor being fitted for my first pair of glasses. There I was, 5 years old, getting my first pair of glasses and that’s when all the torture began. Within an hour of eye blinking and saying letters I had just learned in daycare a year or two before. When I got some of the letters wrong, when the doctor covered one eye, he would tell my mother that I was too old not to know my alphabets. When the truth was that I couldn’t see them.

“She’s only 5, what do you expect from her. What you need to be worried about is getting her eyes straight,” my mother yelled.

“Ma’am by the looks of it, your daughter will never see clearly out of her right eye.”

Now, correct me if I’m wrong but I thought a doctor was supposed to let the family down easy with bad news. He told my mother that, as if she had just hit the lottery. But to her he just said that from now on your child has just become the laughing-stock for all those other evil elementary kids. So, my mother put my new glasses on me and said, “Baby, I love you even more now that you have a special eye. So don’t let anyone tell you different.” I knew that something was wrong with my eye, but I didn’t see it as a big deal. That was until I got to middle school.

Middle school has to be the worst time for a child to be going through any physical challenges in their life. Most days consisted of questions about my eye. Questions like, “What’s wrong with your eye?” or “Are you cross-eyed?” Days of constant staring and finger-pointing it was almost like I was a walking museum and the admission was free. My life was a joke for a long time and I felt that it was time to change my “special eye.” By this time my family and I had moved to Maryland and the possibility of getting help for my eye was a great chance. After a double dose of anesthesia, talk about cartoons, gas masks, two hours of cutting, stitching, and sewing, and last I remember, saying my alphabets backwards, I came out a brand new person. Released from the only one thing that I thought kids at school could tease me about. But again, I was wrong, because after my surgery I had to go back to school with a bloody red eye. The doctor failed to tell my mother that I would have to wear a patch over my eye because it would take about three months before my eye fully healed from surgery. The week after my surgery I was able to go back to school. I was terrified to return to school because of the stares and finger-pointing that was awaiting me. My mom drove me to school that day so I didn’t have to deal with school bus drama. When we got out of the car, I stayed in, only out of fear of the other kids teasing me. My mom pulled me and forced me to walk through the doors. That walk felt like the longest walk of my life. Might as well been on death row. I walked in school and it was nothing but all stares, finger-pointing and giggles. I knew it, I knew that was going to happen. But I had already made up my mind that I was going to be the laughing-stock of my school. I’m to make this funny somehow. As I looked around at all the kids staring, I took off my patch, walked to every kid and showed them what they wanted to see. My bloody red eye.