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WHEN I took a seminar on family business in 2003, I remember one of the exercises was to trace your genealogy. We needed to trace our past generations and illustrate how our family from each side had evolved or not in business. The theory was, in general, that “history repeats itself”.
I once spoke to a family friend who’s older than me. At the time, she had already been separated from her husband for many years.
She related to me how when they were just going out, her then-boyfriend said he would never be like his father, who was a womanizer. In the end, he became a womanizer himself. This is maybe why the character of my father-in-law became a major factor on why I married my husband.
Like many people, I’ve had my fair share of family drama. My parents are both Type A “power parents”. We lived in a demanding family atmosphere, where we needed to be very strong at an early age. I remember referencing to my parents as perfect models. I believe we all want happiness in life. I began to seriously search for my happiness when I was in Grade 5, around 13 years old. I started to journal because I wanted to keep track of the times when I was happy and when I wasn’t. I especially didn’t understand the times when I was at the height of happiness, but would get pulled down to face depressing situations in a blink of an eye.
It now seems ridiculous how, for many years, I’d be half-scared whenever I received great blessings, fearing the impending gloom I was certain was down the road. I remember when I finished grade school as a valedictorian with more awards than I could hope for, but then being sent out from our house that same year after having an argument with my mother.
I was lucky my grandparents’ house was always a place of solace.
It was only when I was 25 that I began to find some answers. I learned one important and fundamental truth: I deserve to be happy. I guess this isn’t unusual with a middle child. You always strive to justify your worth to your family and, in the process, you always feel other people’s happiness are always more important than your own. This isn’t an easy truth to digest or to live by.
But the second most important step for me was breaking the patterns. This can be a painful and brutal process. It’s about letting go of past beliefs according to your present goals. It’s forgetting past words and environments without blame, but for a cause—and that is to find your own voice.
Having a happy family has always been on the top of my list of goals. I was under lot of anxiety before I got married, because I didn’t have a road map for family happiness. At the time, our family was again facing a crisis, which filled me with fear about our family’s history repeating itself in my own marriage.
It was opportune that my youngest sister and I were living with my grandmother at the time. I was able to think and dissect our family’s patterns, and then determine which were good and which I would like to leave in the dustbin of history. It’s almost pre-determined we would end up like our parents. I also took time out to dissect my parents’ good and bad traits, good and bad actions, good and bad results. I did all this, suspending judgment and, instead, valuing them more on all the good they brought to my life.
Being where I experienced a lot of my happy childhood memories also helped a lot to ground me on what I truly valued the most. It dawned on me, the key difference I would like to make in my own family. I look up to my parents greatly for their passion for business and their success. I would still work my whole life to live up to their legacy of a successful business. The difference is, with or without such successful business, I would still have a happy family because my children’s worth will never be based on how much they’d be useful to our business. On the flip side, if my work life is such an essential part of who I am as a person, I’d like to ensure my work has worthwhile meaning in building my family life. Thus, I have genuine passion in child development and human-resource development.
I thank my meditation teacher deeply for teaching me these two important steps. It has allowed me to love myself more and, at the same time, do more for others around me.
As a partner and as a parent, I believe breaking patterns is a necessary catharsis. It gives us more confidence to choose our family’s direction. We’re able to step back and value our past, and also sift through vicious patterns we want to banish forever. Doing so also made me more conscious about not treating each child differently because one is the eldest, another is the middle child, and then there’s the youngest. In the end, the greatest benefit of this process is actually arriving at a sense of gratitude for all those moments that made you YOU.