So the other day in a casual conversation with parents over a lunch outing, the topic of education comes out with something or rather to do with what it is that I am doing with my life.
My mom basically declares that she has no idea what I studied for the past decade.
I admit I have earned multiple degrees which are not exactly part of a streamlined process. Nevertheless, the exchange went something like this (not in English, I should add):
Me: “What do you mean you don’t know what I studied?”
Mom: “I know you went to school for all those years, but whenever someone asks me for what, I have to say I don’t know.”
Me: “Are you kidding me?”
At this point lots of things go through my mind as I am forcing myself to stay calm and patient about this. After all, my parents are immigrants (just like me).
The question of “What are you doing with your life?” is not the same as one typically asks when they want to communicate disappointment or lack of understanding as to how a perfectly good kid turned out so failing unsuccessful in their professional life.
To my parents, that literally means, what are you doing? What do you do at work as a Business Analyst, or a Staff Attorney, or a Researcher, or a Human Resources Manager? These position titles are foreign to them. Industry terms like branding, litigation, prospects or employee engagement programs might as well be alien speak from Mars.
They know nothing about the higher education system in the United States. They’re lucky (boasting here) that they never had to fill out a FAFSA or request an application for a private student loan. I’m not even mentioning having to make the choice of which institution will yield the most successful results for my child. I did it all on my own.
Once it was clear that I no longer wanted to be a starving architect to follow in my dad's footsteps, they never had to worry about what major I wanted to study or what that meant for my employment prospects or personal sanity and social status. We all (me and my parents) attended at least two of the following graduations. However, BBA, JD, LLM, MPA are just a bunch of letters to them. To be fair many folks including non-immigrants also don’t know what some of these stand for.
During that sudden declaration from my mom, however, I couldn’t help but try to backtrack my life in the past ten years at 16x speed to remember a glimpse of at least a statement or a discussion about my educational pursuits and the clearly reasoned purpose for them. In my mind, I had a few of those conversations and announcements. Apparently, my mom had none.
In this speed memory track, what I realized, however, was that all she meant was that it was about time that she knew something about it. May be she just didn’t want to bother me with these “silly” questions before (typical of her thinking), but she really wanted to know.
After 10 years of holding on to those questions, can I really blame her for wanting to find out already once and for all? Even if it was for the sake of having an answer to that very important question any parent is asked: “What does your child do for a living?”
So forceful patience turned into,”O.K. let’s have a fun lesson in this.”
I proceeded to explain each and every degree, decipher each and every capital letter and hopefully brought her up to speed with even a glimpse of some future plans. She was beaming like one proud mama. And that has made all the difference.
I should quiz her soon. May be a pop quiz? :)
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