sacrifice: the line between guilt and anger

BY RAIYAN SHAIK

Sacrifice plays a complicated role in my life. A concept often familiar to immigrant children. Our parents have undeniably sacrificed more than we’ll ever know. My parents left their strong communities, their loved ones, their languages, their food, and a large piece of their heart with their homeland. It was a sacrifice they were willing to make for me and my brother, for our futures. It was their American Dream tax.

But it was a decision made without me.

My parents moved to the United States from India in 2002. They never intended to stay very long; it was only for my dad’s job. As a child we bounced between countries, never having a permanent home in either. But, in 2010, we were done. It was time to move back to India, permanently this time. I packed up my life, which at the time, wasn’t much. Holiday Barbie in hand, I put on my light-up Skechers, my Dora back-pack and said my goodbyes. I couldn’t conceptualize the huge change that was coming; I was just excited to play the games on the plane ride there. But soon enough, I traded in my Skechers for Bata, Dora for Chota Bheem, and Barbie for Tinkle Comics. The real culture shock came when I started school, but the realities of corporal punishment, higher academic standards, and an incredibly strict dress code which mandated the length of our nails are for another day. I just went on living in the way only a six-year-old knows how, and it would be three years before my parents decided that the United States had better opportunities for us, in more ways than one.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. But the village that helped to raise us disappeared overnight, and in its place remained the best efforts of my young parents.

My parents always thought about the long term: trading the comforts of India for the success the U.S could bring to their children in the future. Their parenting was no different. Tough love often feels synonymous with Asian immigrants. Tough love thinks ahead; it creates opportunities for future success, even if it’s hard and nearly unforgiving in the moment. It’s the only love I’ve known for most of my life. It’s well-intentioned. I know that. Yet, tough love still has a way of breeding resentment. All of my parents’ pushes for me to rise to the top, to achieve the success that they wanted me to, coalesced into one intrusive thought in my adolescent brain: you are not enough.

It’s enough to understand that as the eldest daughter of my immigrant family, my parents’ traditional beliefs, sky-high expectations, and years of intergenerational familial pain cemented a cornerstone of my heart with ribbons of sadness running through it. I can now attribute many of my self esteem issues and anxiety to trying to live this perfect life that was expected of me. I was a servant to my parents’ wishes by my own choice. I wanted more than anything in the world to make them proud, to keep them from feeling disappointed after they had done so much for me.

Then there comes a time when you realize you don’t belong to your parents.

You don’t belong to anyone but yourself. And in those moments, when I realized what had happened, I was angry. I was angry that my parents saw any slight self-serving action as an attack on them. I was angry that I spent my entire childhood tiptoeing around their feelings when all I wanted was to be a kid. I was angry that my heart was dripping in empathy for them, yet I wasn’t afforded the same understanding.

I was raging in complete and total silence. I felt like a fighting bull trapped in an indestructible porcelain doll: no matter how angry I was, I couldn’t show it because of the big, bad word looming over my head in capital letters: SACRIFICE.

It’s sacrifice that kept me listening and comforting my mother’s worst traumas from a young age even when it felt like a ton of bricks sitting on my heart. It’s sacrifice that made me construct an iron gate between me and my parents, preventing me from ever asking for help. It’s sacrifice that would ring through my head and numb my tongue, so I would keep my mouth shut and listen at all times, even when they were wrong. This defining decision, this sacrifice, was as constant in my life as the rising sun.

Their sacrifice becomes your burden. This burden then shapes your entire life. No one ever says “because I suffered this, you must now take on the emotional burdens of this family as your own.” But it’s implied. It’s silently expected, and there’s a gnawing feeling that if you don’t, this family falls apart whether that’s true or not. So, that’s what I did. And the very burden that fueled the flames of my anger also tamed it with this heavy, painful guilt.

Then, there’s the oh-so-icky matter of love: the object of sonnets and tragedy. My parents’ love was quiet, a stark difference from the love my friends grew up on. Six pieces of cantaloupe, four apple slices, and a handful of grapes spelled I’m sorry. A crisp $20 dollar bill left on my desk the morning before a field trip spelled I love you. And the biggest of them all, my mother’s private, tearful calls to India, the place she wanted to be, screamed I would do anything for you. I could have lived a happy, successful life in India; we’ll never know. Yet, I can’t help but always be grateful to my parents. If not for the product of building a life in the US, then for the sacrifice that they made, which left almost nothing for themselves and everything for their children.

That, to me, is love.

So, you’re stuck. You’re angry and then you’re guilty that you’re angry and then you’re angry that you’re guilty and the cycle continues. But that isn’t everything. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cycles is that they can be broken. It takes a ton of work, but the end is not out of sight.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things since. My anger and guilt ran my life, and while I acknowledge that this is just a part of being human, I couldn’t let these emotions consume me. I deserved more than that. I also realized, after creating physical distance between myself and my parents as I started my journey to adulthood, that I couldn’t constantly afford to make others happy. With the weight of the world on my shoulders, I couldn’t possibly jump through the hoops I wanted to make my parents happy, and if I somehow managed, I wouldn’t be happy myself doing it. The transition is difficult, and when these expectations are challenged, my parents are undoubtedly going to push back. But, in the small happinesses that I am willing to grant myself, I lower the threshold for how much anger and guilt I can harbor. In the friendships I make, in the art I create, in the books I read, in the stupid, silly mistakes I finally allow myself to make, there’s one less brick on my heart and one more smile in my memory.

After years and years of this family pressure, burden and expectation still control a part of my life. I doubt I will be able to actually talk to my parents about it any time soon, at least not until they’re willing to go to therapy. However, there’s a decision that we can all make, to let go. That’s not to say it isn’t really, really, really hard; because it is. But believing that granting yourself happinesses is not wrong and not an affront to the sacrifice your parents may have made is the beginning of a necessary healing process. Especially if you don’t want to traumatize a new generation of kids. In the end, happiness is not finite meaning constraints on your happiness isn’t the way to increase your parents’ happiness.

So, if there’s an epiphany to be had, it’s this: Your happiness is not the tradeoff for a sacrifice. And if you believe it is, the battle between anger and guilt will never end.