Two little kids were playing outside, sharpening stones by rubbing them against each other. I don’t know the logic behind what they were doing but they continued to do it. I wondered where they had watched and learned it from. Sometimes though, children are just that, children.
They did not know I was watching them which was good because that meant they’d continue to freely enjoy whatever game they were playing. It was a girl and boy. Siblings.
The brother a year older than his sister. I know their parents, their character and personalities so it was easy to tell who each one of them resembled in appearance and in character.
The boy kept yelling at the sister and calling her stupid. He treated her with little to no respect whatsoever. His sister listened and did everything he asked still without question or getting mad. When you are that age (3 – 4 years old), you cannot tell if your elder sibling is bullying you.
You just want to play with them so bad that it doesn’t matter what they do or say to you. You look up to them so much that everything else pales in comparison to them.
His father is like that with his mother. He yells at her, listens to nothing she says and sometimes? He beats her. People think that the hold a parent has on a child is only a roof over their head, instruction and commands but it goes way beyond that.
I bet you a dollar that this little boy wasn’t aware of the magnitude of the things he was doing to his sister. If you asked him in terms he understood well enough, he might tell you he loves his sister to death. He knew that is the way to act because his dad acts that way with his mother.
The power a parent has on their child is in the things they learn through observing you live and picking up on these subconsciously. They find themselves doing exactly what you do and living the way you do without you telling them to. You wonder why they act that way despite telling them to do otherwise.
Learning by observation is the greatest way to learn. If we do not intend to break away from the norm once we grow up and identify the things we picked up from our parents while growing up good or bad, we end up becoming the worst version of our parents.
It is okay to be these things when we are children because we don’t even know we are like that or if what we are doing is a bad thing because it is what we have seen all our lives. But once we are grown and are able to identify or distinguish the good from the bad then it is our sole responsibility to edit our lives and do better.
Yes, you grew up with an abusive mother or father but now you are grown and know what they did was wrong. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to change the narrative?
Are you going to break away from your norm and do better? Or are you going to keep the cycle going? ‘If they did it to me, I’ll also do it to another’, ‘it was done to me and I did not die, they’ll not die too if I do it to them’, ‘they’ll be fine’.
Such an attitude will only create more damaged people. Choose to do better. Choose to break away from the norm. Change the bad things you learnt from your parents subconsciously.
It is easy to think ‘for us that’s the way we are as a family’. No honey, it isn’t the way you are. You learnt something bad. It is continuing and looks normal to you because it is all you’ve seen your parents do and seem to get away with it in society. That doesn’t make it right.
Remember, it isn’t your fault for what the child (innocent) you learnt but it becomes the responsibility of your adult-self to change it because you know better now.
