A Mother’s Goals for Her Children
Working through the night, I can feel my ragged breath beating upon my chest and my sunken eyes yearning to be shut. Surprising me, the clock strikes 4:00 AM jarringly, like a blacksmith’s hammer when it strikes against a plate of steel. Yet, as the clock’s alarm is continuously ringing, I frustratingly ignore it while ineffectively trying to read out of my textbook. I should have gone to bed an hour ago, exactly at 3:00 AM on the dot, but I decided to lengthen my alarm by an hour tonight in preparation for a test.
I have a biology test in the morning and scramble to review through the entirety of the material needed in preparation for the test. It dawns on me that I do not have enough time to review all of it. My parents walk in, the alarm waking them up. My mom yells at me, but not for the reason that I expected. I can see her worried face and she exclaims, “This is what happens when you procrastinate. You can not handle all the classes you are taking. Please do not get distracted by your phone or messages. Just finish fast and please go to sleep. You will end up in the emergency room if you keep repeating this.” Here, my mom faces a dilemma. She knows that she can not force me to go to sleep as I have no choice but to study for the test in the morning.
I would say, as a Vietnamese mom and immigrant from Vietnam, she is much more understanding than most other parents about the academics of their children, especially when dealing with other Asian parents, and I am grateful for this. She is also a softhearted person, a little strict, but always wanting me to succeed. She could not bear to see me fail, especially academically.
Then, as a stereotypical Asian parent, did my mom make me take all seven of my classes? No, quite the opposite actually. I ambitiously decided to take myself while my mom stood on the sidelines, analyzing. She was worried about this coming school year and told me to tone it down on the amount of classes I was taking.
Overall, her two rules for me this school year are the following:
- To get enough sleep and be physically healthy.
- Not end up in a hospital or emergency rule from overworking myself.
On the other hand, my mom is also very supportive as she is always there when I need her. She wants to see me succeed. Whatever decision I decide to make, she is always there to back me up, but sometimes she will warn me against a decision she feels is bad. Her intuition, for the most, is always right. During eighth grade, I had a project in the form of a history notebook due every month. I often had to stay up late into the night and my mom often stayed up late with me to help me color the notebook.
When talking about my college tuition and any debt I would accumulate through my future education, my mom made the decision that my parents would pay for all of it. Despite my persistent discouragement of this, my mom has remained firm on this stance. Luckily for my mom, I want to become a doctor, an anesthesiologist, which has made her quite happy and relieved. I had talked about the pathway to become an anesthesiologist with her. Without a second thought, she declared my dad and her would be supporting me financially for all my years whenever I needed it.
¨Remember the sacrifices that your parents have made for you. Use them as reminders to carry you through life.¨
However, she has also had her faults such as when forcing me to take STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) in eight grade. I had wanted to take Spanish, but she was final on me taking STEAM as she believed I wanted to become an engineer. Fast forward into high school, I hate engineering and am a year behind Spanish. Furthermore, to add another AP class, I also decided to skip Spanish 3 which has caused me quite a bit of struggle in AP Spanish.
However, through this experience, my mom has decided to give me much more freedom on my decisions and has allowed me to make some decisions that are good and some that are bad. For one, a bad decision was probably skipping Spanish 3 and diving straight into AP Spanish. Nonetheless, these decisions have helped me tremendously and have allowed me to learn from my mistakes.
At the end of the day, my mom has told me that all she wants for me is to live a comfortable life and contribute to the world and society in a positive light. She does not want us to be born into this world to cause harm or create hardship for society, but instead, to help build it up. This is something that I have secretly and personally vowed to do for her and myself. My goal and sole purpose is to live life beneficially contributing to society and firmly declaring to myself that all of my life is to always help society. This is all my mom has ever wanted and something I feel the need to carry out not just for her, but also myself.