While we all went through a pandemic this past year, everyone gained something different. For me, it was a new type of bond with my parents.
This past year has been an incredible, yet extremely taxing period of growth for my family and me, but I feel like our relationship came out better than before because of it.
My parents and I have always been friends. If my dad asked me to do something, I normally did it. If I was going to hang out with my friends, I told them the truth about where I was, who I was with and how long I’d be there. If I was upset about something, I knew I could come to my mom to cry.
All throughout my grade-school years, we were never the type to get into fights, keep secrets or get angry with each other very often. While this made for a very happy and easy home life growing up, it made moving out and forming my own opinions about the world all the more eye-opening.
After moving back in with them with two years of growth and education on my own, it became clear that our ability to hardly bring up the things we disagreed about was one of the main reasons we hardly fought about them.
My parents have always expressed how proud they are of me for standing up for what I believe in, even if it differed from their stances. But without having reason to discuss these beliefs, we never really gave ourselves the chance to fully understand the extent and depth that we felt these things.
This past year was filled with many polarizing events, and sharing a living space after years of being apart gave us the perfect opportunity to finally discuss our opinions and to realize how different our ideas really were.
Lockdown was just the beginning of the turbulent year we experienced together. The seriousness of the virus, whether or not I should see certain friends and the safety of different public places were the first things we disagreed on during this big year, but certainly not the last.
None of us were used to the conflicts.
Then came the murder of George Floyd. While we all agreed there was a needless loss of life, the need for marches and the difference between protests and riots fueled even more disagreement, but it also began a different level of understanding between us.
I vividly remember hours of tears and conflicted feelings while simply working up the courage to ask my parents if I could go to a protest being held close to home the weekend after the tragedy. Initially, it was a fight.
Why would I need to join the violence? Why couldn’t they realize the importance of marching? Why couldn’t I just donate, sign petitions and stay home?
We didn’t talk to each other for the next 24 hours. But, the following day, my mom ended up telling me stories of activism she participated in growing up and how her mom didn’t always agree with the cause. She said how thankful she was that I was comfortable enough to be honest with her, and I heard about a time in my mom’s life that she’d never shared before.
After this was a period of many clashing conversations like that one.
They shared their fears for small businesses during a time of economic loss, and I shared how afraid I was for my immunocompromised friends. They shared awful photos and videos of buildings burning and police being brutalized, and I shared stories of mothers losing their children. They shared articles of different legislation being passed, and I tried my best to explain microaggressions and representation to them.
It was hard. At times, it made us all incredibly uncomfortable.
We weren’t used to disagreeing with each other so often, but we were finally fully understanding each other. Gone were the days of tiptoeing around touchy subjects to avoid a fight, because we knew the goal wasn’t to start one. It was partly to educate the other on things they may not have been informed about, and partly to try to understand their thought process.
I know we will never be able to go back to the constant state of ‘okay’ that we had while I was growing up, but I don’t want to go back. Although it was difficult to continuously have a feeling of tension and unease, I wouldn’t trade the growth we went through for the world.
