Family Histories and Parenting

So, after a certain incident occured, I had an opportunity to talk with my father, leading onto some family history that I had never known before. Normally it isn't really a big communication channel between my father and I, but it was interesting to hear what was said today.

My patenal grandfather was a worker for the police, his job was to repair telephone electronics and the overhead wires. It was a arduous job, long hours, bad weather, tricky conditions. In order to cope with this job, he drank every night with his meals. Rather, he ate with his drinking it would seem, eating vegetable dishes with his bowl of alcohol. This of course wasn't really the best way to live, but thats just how things were.

At that point, he became an alcoholic over time, drinking daily, and slowly his mental states also changed. When he was drunk though, he was an aggressive drunk where he would come home and throw rocks at his own home. He never beat my paternal grandmother or his daughter, but rather would pick on his son, my father. The problem was in the morning, he wouldn't remember doing any of it at all, the drunks amnesia. This continued for some time in my father's childhood until my father learnt Judo, and one night when my grandfather grabbed my father, my father reflexively begane a throw, causing my grandfather to let go and back off. He never touched my father again in an assault again. This didn't quite really make sense until then my dad went further in his explanation.

My paternal grandfather was a genius apparently in his youth. However, somewhere along the way, something just came off the rails. When he was young, he was excellent at martial arts. He could hand-stand walk 4km... 4km! He was really strong and used to get into fights all the time (which probably related to his aggresive drunk behaviour I guess) at school. He used to particpate in the Dragon Dance martial arts competitions of the past.

To explain this in more depth. Dragon dance for Chinese New Years back in those days was also a martial arts competition. Basically the teams of dancers danced up a path lined with people (shops) who had basket loads of cracker fireworks. They would light it and throw them to explode on the dragons. The dragons were made of cloth, so the fireworks would explode and burn the dragon body. At the end of the pathway, you were scored on form in the dragon dance, and also how badly your dragon was burnt (the less the better).

My grandfather was seeing how much explosion was happening, so he pretty much said, stuff the dance form, stop the fireworks, so they went all kung-fu dodging/kicking/punching/deflecting etc the crackers so they wouldn't damage their dragon. At the end of the pathway, and event, his dragon won the award for the least damage to the dragon. It was apparently a gold medallion, of real gold, since back then, gold was pretty darn cheap.

So getting back to the point, somewhere in his drunk frame of mind, he knew that being in a Judo grip and about to be thrown meant danger, so he backed off, the innate self-preservation kicking in. It wasn't until many years later when stomach ulcers turned cancerous, my grandfather stopped his drinking, but by then it was too late. He refused surgery, but when the pain got too bad and he wanted surgery, it was of no use due to metastisis.

My father at this time of his life was 17-18 years old, and being the son of the household, bore the brunt of this. He told me that he wanted to run away from home to escape his drunk father, on a nightly basis but he had no-where to go, nor would there be anyone to prevent hands-on activity from his father to his mother and sister. He had no choice but to endure this until the behaviour stopped.

To this day, my father has never ever really been a physical person and I don't recall being punished in any physical manner in my childhood. He also doesn't really drink, and to my knowledge has only ever been drunk once when he tried to drink all this beer that was accidentally left in our freezer after a party, because the beer was breaking the bottles from the freeze expansion.

I guess the point I'm leading towards is that, the behaviours of our forefathers passes down to us in some way. We accept it in our own way and manipulate our reactions to our own and pass it forth. My father being subjected to a difficult time of his life, with alcoholism and physical aggression has decided to focus more of his life in spiritual pathways while not being physically aggressive or drinking past moderation.

Passing this down to me, I've never really felt a peer pressure to drink, and in fact didn't drink until I was well past the age of 21. To this day, I've only been tipsy once, and never drunk. Physical things, I have had one bad incident that was situational, no excuses really, but I tend to try and keep my temper and behaviour into check. I hope that in the future, things too from me will pass down to my children in a positive manner, and the things that I found from my father that I disagree with in a strong negative fashion may find an alternative and better pathway, since there is always best intentions at heart present, just the path of executing those intentions may not have necessarily been the best.

A few additional things in regards to parenting:
Tigers are fierce but never eat their cubs. This saying indicates that no matter how angry and upset with their children they may get, parents don't wish to harm their children.

Parenting is like cooking a steak. Insufficient experience means undercooking the steak, leaving the chance of germs, but at the same time if you are afraid of having a raw steak means you end up overcooking it. In parenting, undercooking means having a wild child, but overcooking means you end up being too restrictive and controlling. It takes much experience and skill to cook a steak just right, like parenting.

Parents never want to apologise to their children since they always want to be right in what they intend for their children, to mould them into the 'perfect' beings. Being willing to forgive your parents is always the first step to resolving issues between them and yourself since you have to understand their sacrifices to bring you to where you are today.

People who do not respond, will respond slowly. If you say hello to someone and they don't respond, then try try again. Eventually, when you say Hello, they will respond (how they respond, I don't know but you'll get some response). If your parents do not wish to respond, then take the soft path (soft attitude, meaning not provocative and verbally aggressive) and slowly slowly work to gain that response. With this response, then you will have communications opening to resolve things with.

So, I hope that perhaps some of these things might be helpful for people out there :)