Have you ever wondered why you are the person you are? Why do some people have so much confidence and others (or I) don’t? Why some people succeed by the age of 30 and others (or I) don’t?
And how much of that has to do with your childhood? How much your childhood influenced your choices today?
With that, how old were you when you realized your childhood wasn’t all that great?
For the longest time, I genuinely thought I had the perfect childhood, a devoting dad and a loving mother with all the things I ever wanted. However, that perception changed when I entered the education industry and began my education journey as a summer school Kindergarten teacher.
They always say childhood determines the rest of your life and that there is no such thing as a perfect childhood.
I was born into a house divided by silence and scrutiny—a landscape where love wore the masks of absence and perfectionism. My father, a granite pillar of responsibility, poured his devotion into long hours building his business empire, returning under cover of night. His footsteps at 9:05 PM were the epilogue to my childhood evenings; he’d gifted me everything that I ever needed and wanted but never bedtime stories. When he spoke, his words felt like knives: blunt truths about his expectations of my sister and I, employees’ incompetence, and the uncompromising standards he held for himself, a man whose love was armored by an ego as impenetrable as his work ethic.
My mother’s world orbited a different sun: a tiger mother wielded report cards like moral scoreboards. “Look at yourself!” she hissed, jabbed her finger at my math test stained with red crosses . “Why can’t you be like them? Look! First of class got a 98, fifth of class got 85….And YOU! Always finish last! You are not working hard enough! Why are you so STUPID?” The relentless comparisons and harsh judgement weren’t just words, they were psychological acid dissolving my sense of self. Every “Look at him/her!” etched a wound that still echoes in my adult bones. My worth = my rank! I was trained to see my own reflection in the distorted mirror of “smarter” classmates.
Her love was a conditional equation where A+ equated to worthiness, anything below A to betrayal. With every piano, dance, swim, math lessons, my mother’s eyes were always fixed on horizons beyond us. We were her unfinished masterpieces, my sister and I, chiseled by criticism, starved of praise and respect. In her pursuit of perfection, she blinded herself to the children gasping beneath her expectations. I was 6 years old when I become the silent witness to my sister’s abuse and it carved its own unique hellscape into my psyche. This wasn’t collateral damage, it was secondary trauma with teeth. From then on, I wore this silence like armor as a child: swallowing words, dulling passions, playing small to avoid becoming my sister’s shadow. School was a theater where I played the mute. While classmates chatted in groups, I counted cracks in the ceiling, praying the teachers wouldn’t call on me for daydreaming about living in another world where I was smart and could live up to my mother’s expectation. When forced to speak, my throat sealed shut. I knew it was survival. If words were weapons, silence was my bunker.
Between these two gravitational forces, my father’s nocturnal diligence and my mother’s daylight interrogations, our family pulsed with unspoken tension. The air thickened with what went unsaid: her resentment of his emotional distance, his silent judgment of her relentless pressure. Yet in this theater of contrasts, I learned love’s duality: that devotion could be both a fortress and a famine, that ambition could nourish and strangle. My mother built a world where success was a god…and childhood was a sacrificial altar.
Behind my silence, ALL I wanted to SHOUT was “I am not stupid or lazy. I am just not supposed to be born.”
