a change to happen — maternal love is fierce).
That’s how addicted he was and how wild he could act (she still remembers how crazy his eyes looked, and she physically recoils when describing them more than three decades later). It wasn’t the first time she’d leave, a pattern many people in abusive, dysfunctional relationships are familiar with. My mom still maintains that her ability to be quiet and calm and not provoke him possibly saved her life. I can’t help but concur. In a rage, my dad once threw a barstool at me. Dumbfounded, I threw it back. Luckily for us both, we had terrible throwing skills.
And yet, after he survived a heart attack in his fifties, my mom encouraged my relationship with my father, and we moved closer to him after years of keeping a distance and living in shelters to avoid him. She’d been to Al-Anon a lot by then, and we all grew to understand that addiction is an illness, not a choice. The older and sicker he got, the meeker he became. And I got to know my dad as a human being before he died, when I was nineteen. I saw his tender and sensitive sides. This taught me not to judge anyone too quickly when only seeing one version of them. Jekyll and Hyde are real, folks (anyone who loves an addict I’m sure will be feeling me here — to this day no other person has ever evoked such a range of emotions within me).
And so, my dad also taught me a deep love of literature. And to bring joy and lightness through surprises. He’d put candy under our pillows, and one day he wore a balaclava to the gas station and said “jellybeans, please,” as he proceeded to pay for them. The gas station attendant went white in the face. My sister and I died laughing. He’d send letters disputing a speeding ticket with “Season’s Greetings!” and “Get Well Soon!” stickers on the envelope. Not to mention the time he sent a copy of a local history book he authored to Buckingham Palace. The royal family always sends a courtesy thank-you letter for all the gifts they receive, and he photocopied the response, liquid-papered over their text, and wrote “her majesty is enjoying the book, and keeps it at her bedside.” (He kept this framed above his desk, of course, and showed every single visitor to the house, including the religious mission workers, who soon regretted knocking.)
My dad showed me that you must always help a friend in need, something his Jewish mother instilled in him strongly (one time during a sober stretch a sick neighbor asked to borrow money, and my dad gave him more than he asked for and insisted it was his gift, something I’ve always remembered). He taught me how to laugh at the ordinary, small things. How to be sarcastic. How to have fun in daily rebellion (you don’t need to pay the parking meter if you just stop for ten minutes, and if you’re shopping in the supermarket, the chips you snack on while cruising the aisles are complimentary). How to parallel park. How to win at Scrabble. How to cook a roast lamb and really enjoy it. How humor trumps everything else, and how it can ameliorate almost any pain.
Looking at the Bad Stuff
But what about the rest of the stuff we learn from our parents? The bad stuff that holds us back a lot of the time? We can investigate it a little, right? Question it? Be curious about it?
We’re allowed to do that and still love the people who raised us. Part of us does, whether we like it or not. Children love who they need to love.
Recently, I was having a coffee with a well-known stylist in New York, and she told me that a lot of the fashion rules we inherit as women come from our mothers. Beliefs like “never wear a red coat!” or “jeans with holes in them are for tramps” or “your handbag must always match your shoes!”
And this stuff — however outdated or irrelevant now — stays with us. Now, a red coat may or may not be your style, but that’s not the point. The point is that we’re always listening to and learning from other people. We have to in the beginning, just to survive. But our lives don’t stop there. We have the ultimate say in what we become, have, and even wear in our adulthood.
Fashion wasn’t my mom’s thing at all. I offloaded on my poor stylist friend all about it when she was probably expecting a light chat about fall trends. I explained to her that when I was growing up, clothing was a touchy subject in my household because you had to have money to be selective, right? My family lived on donations from local families, hand-me-downs from neighbors, and clothing from the school donation baskets.
I remember the desperate ache for approval I felt as a kid wearing used clothes. But my mom’s indifference to what we all wore remained ironclad: “It’s clean, has no wrinkles, so why are you complaining?”
It was humiliating for me. I lived in fear of being caught wearing a friend’s cast-off item that they might recognize. I would spend hours thinking of how I could change a small detail — even a single button — to keep people from suspecting it was the same garment.
Even when it was hot one day in the classroom, I refused to take off a layer, despite sweating at my desk after running around outside. Why? In case “cool Rosie” saw I was in her cardigan (it had her name written on the inside in permanent marker: ROSIE KIM). I mean, if I had been caught in her hand-me-down cardie, what would Rosie think? What would everyone else think? That I’m poor? That I’m not good enough to have my own clothes? That I’m beneath them or even...invisible?
Pleasing the “They”
As a kid, you desperately want approval and will do anything to get it. And it’s understandable in a kid, right? Because you just want to blend in. Standing out even in the smallest way can feel risky.
But what might feel true in an elementary-school classroom is absolutely, completely not true in the real world. Just try to think of even one huge success story you know about a person who completely blended in or who staunchly followed the rules and never went their own way. Go ahead, rack your brains: there isn’t one. The people we read about and look up to are never the ones who lead their lives consumed by the need for others’ approval. They’re self-directed, not in a prison of pleasing. This includes, in many cases, being comfortable detaching with love from their parents’ expectations and desires for them.
Somewhere along the line, these stand-out people learned something very true and very important: that they themselves are their own best asset. They learned that they’re special and that nourishing that specialness means they should avoid listening to the voice of the collective “they” as much as possible. You know the “they” I’m referring to: the people we constantly talk about who tell us how to “live life right” — a college degree, a spouse, a close family, macrobiotic muffins for the kids (who are above average at school, of course). This internalized voice of the “they” tells us we need to be like everyone else if we want to be normal and worthy.
But we act that way to please the “they” a lot of the time, don’t we? We want everyone to like us, to accept us. We just want to fit in and gain approval — and we’ll go to crazy lengths to do so. We spend money we don’t have going to destination weddings for people we don’t like that much, we dedicate our lives to careers that don’t excite us because they sound impressive, and we laugh at jokes we secretly think are stupid, even offensive.
Maybe your parents did that, too. Maybe they still do it. But it’s not going to make you happy. It’s not going to help you to know yourself. How do I know this?
Because I had to get over seeking the approval of others early on. There’s no way a kid like me, who lived in homeless shelters with a nomadic, depressed mother and an addicted father, fit the ideals of the regular families on TV — with their own houses (gardens, even!), no daily screaming, and no police showing up at the door at night because the neighbors reported drug use or suspected domestic violence (what fun!).
I had every reason to be ashamed of my unusual family. And I was. So what can you do when you’re stuck in an environment that feels wrong to you?
