Screw Antoinette! I want my cake and to eat it!

I love my parents and those who are friends with me will know this. They’ll hear the little anecdotes about my parents’ oddities and the enormous contrast in parenting abilities (e.g. my dad’s and mum’s treatment of money but more on that in another post) but very rarely do they hear actual complaints (although I am a teenager so I have the right to an occasional bitch about my parents).

So apart from the occasional hormone-fueled temper tantrum, the relationship I’ve had with my parents through my teenage years have been fairly stable because they’re reasonable of my deplorable Western quirks and I’m tolerant of their old-fashioned Asian outlook. They were pretty ok with my refusal to study science in Yr 11 and 12 as long as I was sure I wouldn’t have a sudden change in heart (and for an Asian this is a big step) and they didn’t really mind my stubborn decision to not go to USYD (and once again, please take into account the fact that I’m in an Asian family).

However, despite the blinding differences in my parents behaviour, what they do have in common is that they’re both very protective of me, I mean, the cotton wool I’m wrapped in gets the royal treatment. This normally leads to frustrating blocks on my social life but because I can see from where they’re coming from we can usually negotiate or I just accept it (and the contrasting parenting means that usually, one of them will side with me which means all I have to do is persuade the other parent).

But sometimes, this over-protectiveness is really frustrating and even when they let me have my way, the overwhelming guilt I suffer from means that I end up feeling like I’ve just sold my soul even though I know I’ve done nothing wrong because I’ve made the right decision and that my parents’ wishes are based on irrational fear of what would happen to me if I experienced the outside world.

Now this isn’t conclusion isn’t based on somehing like ‘my parents wouldn’t let me stay overnight at a friends place so I’m going to go cut myself’; it’s actually a lot more serious than that, even beyond the standards of what the typical teenage girl classifies as ’serious’. For example, my parents were using every guilt tactic that they could think of so that I wouldn’t be inclined take any scholarship that ‘forced’ me to do an internship (like Co-Op and BAcc) because they felt I couldn’t handle the pressures of studying and working as I’m too delicate and sickly and used to the good life my parents have provided for me.

Admittedly, they have a point; I can count on my hand the number of times I’ve actually done anything housework-related (and I’m not using that phrase just to exaggerate my princess treatment – it’s true!!) and I haven’t actually had any real exposure to society (i.e. working) as I’ve lived my entire life by proxy. But I feel that the internship is something that I can handle or at least will learn to handle and that my parents should just be happy that I was offered a scholarship that would almost guarantee me a job before I left university and expose me to some of the most brightest people in the state!

Mum, Dad, I’m glad that you’ve never pressured me to do anything that I didn’t want to do just because you felt it was the ‘correct path in life’. I’m really appreciative of that fact that your alway proud of what I’ve achieved and that you’ve never set the bar up too high; I’ve heard too many horror stories from my friends about how their parents reacted to a minor change in values or goals. But seriously, please please please! be happy that I have this scholarship and stop acting as if I’ve just signed my own death sentence. I’m nervous enough as it is.

Why can’t you be like normal parents?!