Last week, a post from I Will Teach You To Be Rich popped up in my Google Reader about the invisible scripts that guide our lives. It was a great post and some comments came from around the world, so it was illuminating to see the kind of values prevalent in other cultures.
I wrote about a few cultural scripts for my Hyphen blog this week, and I’ve come up with a few more to add to the list that have more to do with adulthood in general.
The most important thing children need is stability and stability = raising them in one house for most of their childhood. Along with this idea is the notion that owning a house is important, and I don’t agree with either one. Children need stability, for sure, but stability also means parents who are happy and a home in which people are consistently loved. I think that trumps a 3-bedroom house in the suburbs. Also, Huz and I are just not the kind of people who can stay in one place — at least, we’re not done seeing what’s out there. While I loved our house back in Connecticut, trying to get rid of it for the freedom to move was a total pain in the ass. I know that the 30-year financial obligation to another home would just make me depressed, so you know what? Owning a house really isn’t that important to me.
Once you have children, your life is over. Exact words of my mom and other women in my family, and yes, it was meant to be a party pooper to discourage all of us from having careless sex. The pessimistic way this was communicated had some weird consequences for my cousins and me. Essentially, we all took this to mean that you couldn’t have fun as a parent. Some of my cousins decided they weren’t going to have kids. Other fam has refused to surrender to this idea, but since their ideas of fun involve things they can’t do with their children, they end up leaving the kids with their parents more often than anyone is comfortable with. I myself still struggle with this idea that I have to be SuperMom and I have trouble asking for help when I need a break. I wish they would’ve been a little more positive about parenthood — seriously, being a mom can be fun, and I don’t want to feel like a lame for admitting that!
Parents should always be there to help you and bail you out. One thing I do appreciate about my fam is that disownage doesn’t really happen unless you’re a crack addict. They always talked about how wrong it was that white folks would cut their children loose after high school — it was their responsibility to support us at all cost. On one hand, my cousins and I have been fortunate enough to be supported through college and early adulthood — while not all of us were cut out for university, we all had the opportunity to go. On the other hand, our parents have enabled second childhoods for many of us, and having them as a safety net has made many of us risk-averse and unwilling to deal with the actual responsibilities of parenthood and financial independence. We have mostly not been allowed to fall and as such, we haven’t really been able to learn from our mistakes.
Proposals should only happen one way: the man gets down on one knee in the most romantic way ever and must present you with the biggest diamond you have ever seen. Implicit in this is the idea that there’s only one way for a man to show you he loves you, or that if he does things the way it’s always been done before, it’s a guarantee that he loves you, OR that girls should wait for this to happen. This was a really tough one for me to stop feeling weird about because as many of the women I knew were getting married, I found even the most progressive and feminist women still competing over who had the most romantic proposal or who has the most expensive ring. And to be honest, there hasn’t been a single wedding that the women I know didn’t talk shit about. Every girl I know has said at least one stank thing about their best friend’s wedding. Obviously Huz and I have not led the most conventional lives by any stretch of the imagination, but we’ve always had fun and we’re happy with the way we’ve done everything. I never wanted to be part of that race, which was why I really wanted to elope. Even then, I see how I felt a little pressure to elope in Vegas rather than in a courthouse closer to home, just so we could have an exciting story to tell.
If you don’t look busy, or if you don’t complain about being busy all the time, you’re expendable. This is obviously prevalent in the American work ethic, but it focuses on time spent rather than how much work is actually getting done, or how efficient the processes are. There is something wrong with you if you find a way to get your work done in under eight hours each day (which honestly seems kind of backwards to me). One of my first jobs was in a very old insurance institution where this was deeply ingrained in the corporate culture. People stayed in the office for over 9 hours a day just to keep their jobs, and most of those hours would be spent on smoke breaks or in “meetings.” We had meetings all the time, and my former boss would consistently run over the allotted time. And these heads would still complain about not getting anything done, then side-eye you for trying to leave at 4 because you were trying to get back to your family. Needless to say, it was a miserable place to work and I was incredibly happy to leave.
The only jobs that count are the ones where you’re working for somebody else. Any ounce of entrepreneurial spirit is seen by my family as some kind of harebrained scheme. In some cases, this is true — my cousins have known a couple of friends who can’t seem to hold down a job, people who are constantly falling victim to get-rich-quick scams because they just don’t want to work. But consulting or freelancing or even starting a business has always been seen as too risky to depend on as a career. And even if someone has managed to do it successfully, my fam is still reluctant to consider it a “real job.”
You have no hope of becoming good at something if you’re starting now. One thing my dad was good at was lamenting all the things he could’ve been great at if he’d just started young. “I’m too old to do –” seemed to be his favorite saying, and as such, he often talked to me like I was the redemption of his lost hopes and dreams. In an society that favors youth and in an age of Willow Smiths and other child stars, think it’s a really common belief that at some unknown age, we become too old to learn and absorb new things. It’s a hard idea to overcome, and yes, learning new things might take a little more time and work as you get older, but it’s not impossible. I’m amazed at how many great photographers I’ve seen who only got their first camera when their children were born. And have you read The Four Hour Workweek? That guy is amazing!
Two I’ve come up with that stand in opposition with each other are: Your job should only support your lifestyle, so make enough money to live well (Filipino immigrant value) and You should live out your passion and do what you love, since happiness is more important than money (American Gen Y value). I’m fortunate to be somewhere in the middle right now — doing something isn’t necessarily my lifelong dream but is still in my desired field and also pays a wage that enables me to live comfortably. Many of my cousins are also lucky to be in jobs they don’t hate. But some still struggle, and I think we all have a sort of fucked up idea that to really become an adult means to have some sense of giving up. Implicit in this is the idea that it’s childish to persist in chasing your dreams. But jeez, has anybody ever approached adulthood with enthusiasm before?
And one last one that is decidedly a right-leaning value and something my mom and aunts and uncles ascribe to is the idea that hard work will get you anywhere you want to be; if you’re poor or uneducated or if you don’t do well in school, you’re just not working hard enough. I don’t think I can get into why this is a damaging idea right here — essentially all you have to do is take a college history or ethnic studies course, or hell, read something on the internet to see how this is wrong.
I could probably come up with a thousand more, but I’ll stop for now. What are some scripts you’ve had to reject or ones that you still struggle with?
