I have a curious situation here. From the day I first got my learner's permit to drive right up to the day I got out on my own, I always felt like my family was trying to keep me away from cars. When my brothers' cars would break down, it'd be a mad dash to fix it, spare no expense. When my car broke down, they'd fix it when they got around to it. In the meantime, I could get a ride from one of them. When I decided to learn how to fix them on my own, all I got was discouragement. In one instance, I diagnosed on my own that the carb needed rebuilding. I bought the rebuild kit and heard nothing but condescending remarks and things like "It's too complex. You can't rebuild it." Well, I rebuilt it, put it back on the engine, and after a couple of spins to fill the bowl, got the car running again. Instead of being happy, or at least relieved, that I had pulled it off, they actually looked disappointed. This sort of thing happened an awful lot as I was growing up. A couple of weeks ago, my husband asked me how I ever managed to get a license. I thought he making cracks about my driving, but he explained to me that some years back he had heard my brothers and my father grumbling that women shouldn't be allowed to drive and that the only reason my mother had a license was because she worked graveshift and nobody was willing to drive her to work and home. He said he'd heard them say something about me being so uppity as to fix my own car. This was disturbing, as I always thought I was going paranoid. I dismissed it thinking the notion silly, but my husband's earnestness in his question validated what I thought was an overactive imagination. It was like thinking you were going crazy because of some wild hallucination only to find out that you weren't hallucinating. I do say, this revelation has certainly answered quite a bit about my family's behavior in years past. Right now, I'm responding with amusement, imagining these guys patting themselves on the back for having testicles. It keeps disturbing me from time to time, though. I hardly talk to my bros anymore, and my folks are both dead, but now it's like whenever I see an old family photo, I just keep thinking about how screwed up some of their thinking was. It's so asinine I can't even bring myself to hold it against them. Has anybody been through anything like this?
All parents have expectations and ideas of how their children should be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't. Ultimately, it only matters if you think you "gave in" to it. Since you did not, is it really worth thinking about? What I get from this is that you are a strong person with her own notions of what's right for yourself and the courage and perseverance to get it. Bravo. You should be proud of your achievements, not dilute that pleasure by thinking of what other people should or should not have done/thought.
Family skeletons? My grandfather raped most of his daughters (and step daughters) and is likely the father of at least a few of their children. He visciously beat all his children and locked them in teh closet for days at a time when they would misbehave. The cycle of abuse did not end with my father, but it did finally end with my brother. My older brother is a wonderful father to his 4 sons despite (or perhaps because of) spending the better part of 15 years in jails, prisons, rehabs and mental hospitals - mostly due to heinous physical abuse at my father's hands. My father beat my brother senseless since he was a young boy, but never once laid a hand on me.
