Everything was a ticket to
“THE LECTURE”
English, French, Mandarin
I am so pleased and grateful that our son and his fianceé invited us to offer some thoughts about wisdom in life and in relationships at their wedding. Mike and I laughed that in the kids’ teen years we parents were all too willing to give advice. Every event, every day, EVERYTHING was a “ticket to THE lecture!”
THE LECTURE consisted of repeats on these themes:
- You are precious, your body is precious, treat it with respect: don’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or enter into “easy or early” relationships
- Pick good friends, choose NOT to want to be in the COOL group if they are not doing right
- Study hard, use your time well, use your opportunities
- And more: respect the parents who are SO annoying to you even now, help Ah Mah; be kind to your younger siblings and cousins; etc.
How many times did we DO “THE LECTURE”?! And uh . . . Was it heard? Yes, I think it was heard and so, the many repeats became insulting and nauseating.
Of course, we pounded on the topics because we were anxious and young. “THE lecture” was coming from “young-ish” parents who were 41 when our first born turned 13 and 53 when our last kid turned 20. Chronologically that’s 12 years of parenting teens, but compiled over 3 kids, that’s 21 years of having “teens”! It seemed longer!
We felt vulnerable and exposed. Elizabeth Stone and others have said that “Having a child is like having your heart walk around outside your body.” Kids were growing beyond our control, getting further and further beyond our life circumstances and imagination. For sincere people who depended on being careful with patients and students, and on staying in control of ourselves for success, it was really hard to extend more freedom, the freedom that kids NEED in order to grow.
Mike was very stressed – he was raising kids in a world in which he had not grown up. Coming from the post World War 2 recovery mode of Taiwan, he thought the Alabama schools were too lax, that math and science levels were too low, that kids were not asked to memorize enough music, facts, or formulas, that there was too much “play” (extracurricular stuff) going on. I did agree with him on many of these points but we disagreed on how to steer kids through. He was more rigid and wanted to see results; I was more flexible and TRUSTING in the developmental patterns of learning we were seeing. He seemed to think that most mistakes reflected bad attitudes, by “spoiled” kids who lived in luxury. I saw kids doing pretty well and trying to please much of the time.
Because I was up closer to their schools and friends I knew something about their academic and social stresses. I felt kids were doing a lot of work that we did not understand. I saw that there was “a reach” they needed to make to negotiate the higher tech 21st century world of which we knew little. I was OK with kids making small mistakes because I felt it taught them how to avoid bigger ones.
Our kids had an added layer to negotiate: the challenges of being so-called “bi-racial” and “bi-cultural” in the fourth quarter of the 20th century in Deep South Alabama – that’s “a whole ‘NUTHER” dimension! Mike and I each experienced some racism, but our solid foundations in our cultures of origin had built stable identities in us. Our kids were not getting those simple answers from a monoculture. Their mere presence revealed a complexified social situation.
Mike was over-worked in the hospital – the high levels of demand for his medical expertise isolated him. He did experience occasional racism when a patient refused to be seen by a “non-white” physician. But Mike would be happy – his schedule was so jammed that he didn’t really mind being thus released from taking up a primary care physician’s patient consultation for his specialty services. The patient’s refusal gave him more time for other patients. Ironically, many of the patients who refused to be seen by him would eventually realize that they did NOT yet have a diagnosis because they had sent the talented sub-specialist AWAY. Sometimes they more humbly asked to be put back on his list. He graciously did help them even after being insulted.
The kids and I were out in the broader social scene. Mike rarely had time to go to school events or church, so kids “passed as white” with me until about their puberty. Seven members of Mike’s family including 3 school age children, moved in with us for more than six months. The little friends of our son, then 8 years old, said, “We didn’t know you were Chinese until we saw your cousins!” When people learned that I, a “white” woman, had married “outside” my “so-called” race (“miscegenation”), they looked down upon me for violating “the code of pure ‘white’ womanhood” especially prevalent in the American South. In fact, our marriage was technically illegal in Alabama under Section 102 the 1901 constitution that outlawed interracial marriage. This rule was not voted out and removed from the constitution until 2000.
Mike had grown up as the first son in a Chinese family – the role expectations in his family and in a largely homogeneous culture were clear, if demanding. I also grew up in a relatively, if artificially, homogeneous culture, but role expectations were shifting. With the push for Feminism in the later 1960s, I was stuck in the liminal space in the societal transitions of “White North America” between being a “society wife/ stay-at-home mother” and being a career woman. I would have to choose either/ or. If I wanted to “work outside the home for pay” combined with “work inside the home for love,” I would have to do those roles sequentially, first one, then the other over my life span because there were very few supports for doing them consecutively. The amount of encouragement needed was out of most people’s (men’s, mothers-in-law’s) imaginations. Although I was a top student my family neither wanted me to be an MD nor to marry one – for the same reason: to them a medical career is just too hard on a family.
So, Mike and I were not exactly on the same page and not exactly clear about the best ways to proceed with our kids. I have always loved prayer, but as I saw our kids functioning in a world more complex than the one that trained me up, I became even more devoted to prayer. I released most of my anxiety and trusted that God would be present to guide the kids in the best paths for them. My most common prayer was Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that He who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (NIV).
Susan Olmstead Wang 