Identity

Leaving for Pakistan

Until my parents decided to leave for Pakistan, I had been asking my sisters regularly, when are they going? I felt bad asking and wishing for their departure, but I couldn’t handle the arguments, the tension and the disappointment anymore and just wanted them gone. It was affecting me in so many ways, i didn’t have the space in my head to stop and think about myself or where my life was going, because instead I was going over the same issues of the last seven years.

When they announced their departure they tried to persuade me to go with them. Whilst they ha given up on my living with them in Pakistan, they were now focusing on my going with them, assisting them during the pilgrimage to Mecca and that afterwards I should go to Pakistan with them, stay there for a month and then return.

As I was awaiting a job offer, I explained this wouldn’t be possible. They weren’t pleased, as they don’t take into account professional life and the impracticalities of telling a potential employer who wants you to start in the next few weeks that you are going to be abroad for a month.

I said I’d visit them towards the end of the year, to help my father sort out his financial issues and visit them.

They weren’t pleased but accepted it and started to make preparations to leave, whilst I counted down the days until they did so.

After a period of absence

After what seems like forever not writing this blog, I’ve forced myself to sit down and re-read the last ten or so posts, and write a new one. Why haven’t I been writing? I’ll explain gradually over the next few posts.

To provide a brief update, since the last time I wrote, my parents have moved back to Pakistan. There were many reasons for them returning, and I, of course was one of the factors.

I can’t describe how it felt when they said they were leaving. I feel ashamed to say I was both relieved and sad at the same time.

I was relieved because the pressure of balancing two completely different lives and personalities was becoming harder and harder. Constantly going back and forth between the same arguments, the same battles in my head, torn between wanting to please them but live my life the way I wanted to. Now I wouldn’t have to worry about making excuses for myself, my lifestyle and justify what I was doing every minute of the day whilst I wasn’t under their roof.

I was sad because they are my parents who I love. What kind of a daughter am I, who can only cope with a relationship with them if they are in a different country?

So my parents left for Pakistan and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Re-reading through my previous blogs I’m reminded of the constricted feeling I felt early last summer, when I tried to balance living my life the way I want it, with the way my parents wanted me to live it.

How my head ended up being full of their demands and their disappointments in me. How I ended up being torn between trying to satisfy their needs and my own needs in the way I wanted to live my life.

Now I’m not living with them, now I’ve regained my old life back, it seems ludicrous I even allowed myself to slip into that trap, after all those years of living away from them.

But it scares me it will be a repeated pattern throughout my life, because of their stubbornness and my unwillingness to give into them.