Tag: Daddy

Money

My current stream of consciousness is kind of all over the place, but bear with me.

I am not a woman of money. I don’t know what it will look like if and when I finish school this coming May, but I don’t expect a lot of money. I actually am not sure what to expect, but I am hoping that it will be something decent, something worthwhile. I know I didn’t go into this profession thinking I’d be raking it in, but I am hoping that it will be sufficient, enough to keep me happy and sane and just enough to get me out of this house. The hard part is that I like nice things and nice food and often times, these things and foods come with a higher price than I should probably indulge in. But that’s okay. Sometimes that’s what rainy days are for, that’s what saving is for. But at the end of the day, these nicer things and nicer foods aren’t the things that make me happy.

My parents did a lot of things for me as a kid. They shielded and sheltered me. While some can argue that wasn’t great, but at the same time, they gave me something that I don’t think I could have gotten otherwise: a childhood filled with friends and memories. I never felt poor or low-income. I felt happy. While I didn’t think we were rich or raking in the dough, I knew that we were okay. I knew that I had friends and a family and despite how much I hated some of their authority and decisions for me, I loved them anyway. They taught me that at the end of the day, a few pennies are just a few pennies, but a family can’t be replaced. They taught me that money will come and go, but it’s not important to have the “finer” things in life because I already have them. My parents, or more specifically, my father, didn’t want me to worry about the things that didn’t matter like money so I could go live life and be a kid. My father made it possible for me to not depend on money, to see it as a necessity to live.

Yes, maybe I wasn’t able to fully learn the value of money in that way, I learned something better. I don’t need a lot to make me happy, but the little things. While I may be slightly unhappy now with a mother who is nuts, but set that aside, I am happy. Sure, I like fancy foods, fancy things, but I can live without those. Give me a decent living space and people in my life who matter and I will be happy.

I don’t need much and that’s okay. It’s what the East Side taught me and even though it becomes a smaller and smaller part of my existence, it will remain a big part of me.

Starting Fresh

The funny thing is now that Xanga has gone away with free blogging, I was looking for a new outlet and I couldn’t find a suitable that I would have enjoyed. So while this blog is not necessarily free, I do feel a sense of freedom in being able to post here, process my thoughts, etc.

One of the things on my mind lately is the idea that when you look for a partner, you are looking for someone who represents a parent. In a heterosexual relationship, I, as a daughter, would look for someone with qualities like my father. Though interestingly, the argument can also be made against it to say that people would want to look for someone opposite their parent, someone unlike my father.

I’ve been trying to decide if either one matters. While there is a part of me who would want someone needy, someone who attaches to me, someone who affectionately and romantically dotes on me with his every waking breath, I’m also accustomed to someone who, while may still love me a great deal, doesn’t do any of those things – just like my father.

See, Daddy was not the overly affectionate man, at least not after I turned 8. There were few “I love you”s, few hugs, few words of affection and encouragement. While that may have brought a lot of resentment throughout my teenage years, it was during college and still now that I am learning all the ways in which my daddy shows me that he cares. It really helps me build my intuitive skills of being able to see the signs in different ways.

For example, Daddy never says no to anything that I ask that would be considered as a need. Car registration due? Yes, he can pay for it. I moved into the master bedroom that was supposed to house two cats, a cat tree, and a queen sized bed? Let’s get you a twin-bunk work station so you have more room. Sprained my ankle and had to hobble around the house? I’ll drive you to and wait with you at the doctor’s office. At no point in my life did he stop loving or caring for me; at no point did he ever do anything to hurt me or create a deficit in any way.

However, all those years left me yearning for an affection that would never come, not in the form that I was looking for it anyway. While I am still working on those “kinks” to my personality, my needs and wants, I wonder if that kind of “affection” is something that I am still yearning for in a partner, something that I still need. That in order to feel validated as a person of worth and as a person deserving of love, I need to find a partner who can constantly affirm me.

Which brings me back to my current partner. While he is not a replica of Daddy, there are features to him that remind me of Daddy – he is amazingly independent, driven, ambitious, and definitely not a person to dote “affectionately” on another in the sense that we in this Western, American society considers as “affectionate” actions. But the other amazing part is that this man, this person who has chosen to be my partner, loves me and loves me in ways that only I would know and see as signs of love, like when he would wake up on Saturday mornings just to drive me to practices and pick me up later. Or drive to Fremont during traffic hours to pick me up from the BART station. Or set aside his studies for the weekend because I was there to visit him. Those are the things that tell me otherwise and this man, just like my daddy, has never given me any reason to doubt him otherwise.

So, in regards to the original question of am I looking for someone like my daddy or not? I would say that I am not looking for either. I am looking for a partner who will love me for me, despite the fact that I still have so much growth to do. But the thing is, everybody needs to grow and I guess what I’m really looking for is someone who not only loves me, but is willing to grow with me, even if we are doing it separately yet together.