When I was a child, my parents were my heroes. When I grew up, I started to see the struggles they faced when life threw rocks at them. They are not perfect, because they are just humans. I know they have always tried their best to love, nourish and protect their children. Loving is hard. It doesn't always work because life is never an easy ride.
I used to witness my parents argue and through the eyes of a child, it was something remarkably sad and scary. The fear of loosing one or the other. Then, I saw my parents trying their best to overcome and move forward towards healing. It took them weeks to be able to get back to their normal state. I did not really understand why did these ups and downs keep going on in a circle? I started wondering if marriage was that boring when dealing with argument and reconcilement every time; or would it be like that, a roller coaster ride, but for a lifetime? By that time, I was just a teenager. I was confused, but my mother reassured me with so much love and care. She told me not to worry, focus on studying, go to work, earn money and become a successful woman. My mother has never wanted me to look up to her as a role model but encouraged me to find my own.
To every little girl, mother is her role model but my mother has never expected her to be my role model. She has always wanted me to be different from her, make my own choice of life and put myself first. By that time, I did not understand until I got married and became a wife. The pressure of marriage, especially during this pandemic time, is awfully high and stressful. If marriage nowadays suffers greatly from the "new normal" way of living due to Covid-19, marriage in the past highly suffered from social standard and prejudice. As a housewife, my mother was financially dependable and that created a huge pressure on her. Vietnam, by that time, just walked out of wars and started recovery. Jobs were rare and poverty took over the country. Every marriage struggled. However, my parents have always tried their best to overcome every obstacles and continued moving towards their goal: building up a family.
I've been married for one year and a half and like every other couple, we argue, fight, compromise, make up, forgive and move on. Sometimes it will take 2-3 days to reverse into our normal state. We are still in the early age of marriage, so we move on towards healing quickly and because we have the same goal as my parents had when they got married: building up a family. As long as we look at the same direction, we will be moving onwards as a team together.
I am a positive person and always trying to look for the silver lining in every obstacles I face. I have to be honest with you here: like the title of this blog, loving is hard... It really is! Switching the bad mood after an argument into a loving mood again, it takes much forgiveness and love. Now I could understand how hard it was for my parents to pull through challenges in marriage, yet mentioning many challenges at the same time when Vietnam was rebuilding the economy after wars; people were adapting and practicing the new system in Saigon.
The older I get, the better I understand how much love and sacrifices that my parents devoted to family, to me and my sister. Especially my mother, I understand the reason that she wanted me to be independent but also what she has been teaching me is to embrace femininism. Loving is hard... It's hard to balance, to not cross the line, to give and earn respect, to work things through as a team, to forgive a thousand times and more; finally, to love unconditionally. It's theorically like that, but to put it into practices demands devotion like how my father and my mother have done. To be able to do that, both must have a never-give-up spirit.
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