You get slapped in the face, that’s what. That’s exactly what happened to me last Friday, when I refused to listen to another long and mundane advices (i.e: rules and obligation as a grand-daughter) from my grand father, which had been forced upon my head for me to listen to since I was a child.

Just name it and I can guarantee that I got it all; from stupid things like being forbidden to have a boyfriend who tattooed or pierced his skin, or getting a future husband who was filthy rich and guaranteed unlimited financial security (apparently that’s all a girl ever needs from a man), to touchy issues like racial prejudice based on the color of my boyfriend’s skin, and onto a more outrageous issues of my prerogative as a woman in which I was told that being a girl it was a must that I had to have children, because ‘that is what a woman is destined to do’. Riiiight.

Of course I never took anything seriously – I figured by the time I actually get married he’d be long gone by then.Not that I wish for it, of course.

Nevertheless, my relationship with my grandparents, particularly my grand father, was of a normal one – when I was studying overseas, I sent him letters and gave him a call every now and then for a little chit-chat. Whenever there was a family gathering, I used to come up to him and say hi, and he was very affectionate to me as well.

But that was when I was the naive, obedient girl who was kept on a leash and being led around like a dog.

The problem started to arise around three months ago when out of the blue, my grand father instructed my mother so that I should get proposed by my boyfriend. For what reason, I couldn’t have the slightest clue.

What happened next was that my boyfriend was asked to come around to the shop (which my mother owned and practically lived in) by my mother’s business partner – who had no familial relation whatsoever – to have a little talk about having his parents to come over and propose me. My mother claimed she knew nothing about it.

Even though my boyfriend was previously advised to hide this from me, of course he told me about it anyway because he didn’t like keeping anything back from me, and when I found out what happened, I was shocked to bits and went absolutely livid, because that was not the way how I wanted myself to be proposed.

First of all, my boyfriend and I are working on establishing our own business, so our main cash and incomes are invested in it because we have planned this ever since we started going out together, due to the fact that we both hated the idea of working for someone else.

Secondly, whatever is left from our income is allocated to invest in a house for ourselves, which is the first priority after saving up for our own wedding – another future expenditure to think about.

Thirdly, I detest the idea of getting wedded off from the expenses of someone elses, especially my parents or his. I have a principle that since I am old enough to earn my own money, not to mention the amount that my parents had to shed for my overseas education, it makes sense that I should be able to stand up on my own two feet and stop being dependent on them, money-wise and all.

Besides, I don’t want my wedding to be everyone’s wedding, because that’s what happens when you let your parents pay for your wedding cost – you have to involve them and go along with their rules; it’s all about their friends and relatives and their choice of places, food and decoration and what elses. This places the control of things on them, and you have no choice but to agree, even if it puts off the reason why you want to have a wedding ceremony in the first place. This is why I chose to fund my own wedding, no matter how long it takes me to get there, at least I get to do it my way. Even if it was a gift, I refuse to take it.

Did my grand father knew anything about this? Of course not. He never bothered to ask and we never got the chance to tell him because the occasion never arise. I never really thought that marriage was still so sacred for him, after all that happened to his children. As far as I knew, none of my grand father’s children, including my mother, are in happily married conditions. Each of them suffered in their own ways, as the old saying goes, ‘Every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is always different.’

Briefly speaking, my mother hasn’t been living at home for four years. My oldest auntie is stuck with a lazy husband who lives off her, and my younger auntie and her family are still living at my grandparents house so every little thing that they do are always watched and judged by my grand father, and the youngest child, my uncle, who was nearing forty, was still enjoying his life as a single bachelor who lives with his parents.

And I won’t even go into details about how fucked up it was that none of my parents or my grandparents even bother to talk it face-to-face with either me or my boyfriend themselves. Being the grown-ups they are, I really thought they would know what the word ‘respect’ meant. How can they demand us to respect them when they don’t even respect other people, regardless of what age they are?

Did they even bother asking about our plans for the future? No, they just jumped into conclusions and made assumptions of their own.

So that Friday, when I saw the look on my grand father’s irate face as he beckoned me with his hands (like I was a five year old) to come over, I decided; No more.

No more to being the obedient daughter who tries to please everyone and runs her life based on what others want, instead of what I want.

No more of this ‘because we have raised you and do all the things parents are supposed to do, you are obliged to make us happy by agreeing to live your life they way we want it to.’

No more family gatherings where everyone can gossip behind each other backs and interventing the personal lives of others, and all is done in the name of family.

No more parents trying to live their lives through their children because they were too selfish and ignorant to want to give any freedom for their children to be themselves.

They can disown me if they want – I’d rather choose my freedom.

Yes, I’m that selfish.

Have you ever noticed that Indonesians have the habit of being slow when it comes to the importance of others?

Take the girls at the supermarket check-out counters, for example. They beep every single item of my purchase in such a slow pace, it almost drives me nuts. If I had to do it myself, it would have taken me half the time that it takes them to do it. I can’t help but wondering why they are so slow – perhaps they are dieting and skipping lunch so they lack the energy to move faster or perhaps they just have a row with their husbands and they feel a bit down. What do you think?

I also notice the same thing when it comes to those who do administrative jobs in banks or government offices. Everything is being processed in such painstakingly slow ways, totally oblivious with the build up of queues of people waiting and the impatience most people have to endure, not to mention also the time that is already wasted for waiting in line just to process something that should have taken a mere five minutes to get done.

But do you also notice that when it comes to the importance of themselves, all of a sudden Indonesian people develop a fast-paced, even impatient attitude of getting things done?

Take the freeway, for example, and count how many people are driving over the speed limits just because they want to get to their destination faster, or those who can’t be bothered to get in line behind the queue of the exit gate that they actually cut other people’s path who are already queueing way before they do, thus creating a traffic jam because instead of a one organised line there are two or three lines queueing to get out of a road that is only meant for one vehicle. I’m sure any of you have been in such situation before, or perhaps you are one of those people who like to cut other people’s paths?

The same thing also happens on a busy road where there is only a couple of zebra crosses to use. Most pedestrians can’t be bothered to wait for the traffic light to turn red so they decide to jaywalk and risk their lives by crossing the road anywhere they like. And of course because there are so many of them crossing the road, those who are on vehicles are forced to slow down and stop, which again, causes traffic jam to the vehicles behind them who are wondering what the hell is going on, because the light has turned green but the traffic is not moving.

The irony of it all is that Indonesia is supposed to be a religious country, and yet there is no other place where I have witnessed selfishness that is so potent and obvious such as what I see in this country, that to meet a truly selfless person compels the raise of an eyebrow and a wave of suspicion.

The second irony, which is far worse than the first is the fact that my fellow workmates used to tease for being such a fast walker. “You walk so fast, it makes you look like a man” they said. When all the while I kept thinking, “I’m not the one who is walking too fast but you are the one who is walking too slow.”

And the biggest irony of it all is that most Indonesians are failing to recognize the right time to be patient and taking things slowly, or when it’s time to be quick and acting promptly.

I love my country, but the people in it are making it harder for me to do so.

Well, I don’t feel young. The more I put more thought into working for someone else – again – the older and more incapable I feel of my life. Another stupid job-hunting process. Another stupid psycho-test to go through. Another stupid replaceable position filled with mindless useless meetings and middle-aged idiots wanting their asses to be worshiped.

“You must be a better leader than me, otherwise what would happen to my business?”

Gee, thanks. Didn’t realize all those years I spent overseas were meant as hidden investment which I must pay back later. Don’t you think I have my own passion to pursue? Wasn’t it you who taught me to be a good decision-maker and to do what I love doing? Then why are you making your mind up for me?

“I always sacrifice everything for everybody else! I never even care about myself! And this is how you repay me?”

I never wanted you not to not care about yourself. I’m actually getting sick of you trying to make fuss on everything else but ignoring your own happiness. Why bother owning a company and everything if you can’t even spare some thought into giving something back to yourself?

“I have all these assets worth millions and money to circulate. I’m delaying payments for legitimate reasons. You must understand.”

No, I don’t understand. All you talk about is money, money, money and how you have to invest in this and that and circulate it this way and that, in order to get even more money. I’m sick of hearing about it. The more you get, the more dissatisfied you feel. I wonder how you even sleep at nights. And then I realized that you don’t.

“I think that cousin of yours is smart for nailing such a rich boyfriend who owns so many companies. She will never live in hardship.”

Yes, she is smart, because she realizes head on that all she has is her looks and there is nothing left inside that empty little head of hers. Yes, she will never live in hardship, but in case you forget, money doesn’t buy happiness. Don’t forget that you were once poor yourself. Why get on such high horse and think that you are so different from those who are beneath you?

“The reason why parents always take sides on the child who is less fortunate is because they know that child needs more help than the others.”

Please, by all means, spoil that child with every single strength that you can find. After all, that’s how it has always been since I was young. But don’t expect that spoilt brat would have an epiphany and change for the better – because the only person who is ruining his future and mentality, is you.

“Why don’t you help around here and expand my business like many other young ones who’ve made their parents proud by doing so.”

No, thank you. Why would I want to work for a person who doesn’t ever listen and trust my ideas. I’ve been through it before and it’s the most tiring job in the world – trying to convince people that you are capable. You either believe it or you don’t. It’s not that hard. After all, didn’t you pride yourself in ‘knowing’ people’s talents and characters? That’s why you sent me overseas, wasn’t it? I don’t even care whether or not you are proud of me. Not anymore.

You. The one who is standing on top – I’m scared that you might fall, and I wouldn’t want to be there to catch you.

Because I don’t know you anymore.

I hadn’t been there for ages, and the last time I could remember was when I was little and my dad would bring me around and everyone would coo and say how much we looked alike. I used to enjoy being ‘paraded’ around the office because what child wouldn’t? There was the attention and the rare occasion that my dad felt proud of having me with him – the kind of pride a father feels about his own daughter, looking so much like him yet so different, and when people looked really carefully they would soon realize that we did look very much alike.

Now that I’m much older, it seemed weird and surreal, because as soon as I stepped in, the traces of my childhood memory about the place were completely replaced by the reality that took in really fast. As like any other huge factories, the place smelled heavily of chemical stuff, but it was the kind of smell you would tolerate just because it brought you a certain pleasant memory, especially because I remembered that my dad’s friends were really friendly and always laughing and threw jokes to each other, and how comfortable and neat my dad’s personal office was, with the little gimmicks he received from his clients at the pharmaceutical companies.

We came early, so he showed me around the factory to see how the stuff was being produced – something he’d never done before. I didn’t ask for it, he just did it. But I sensed it was the closed-connected feeling that he was trying to reach out to me, trying to make me feel comfortable because perhaps he didn’t want me to be sitting at the guest room being unattended and bored.

After a long day of dealing with Macs computers and getting enough poly-pitch measuring in my mind and overburdened with having to alter our usual ways of designing, I had enough and I wanted to leave. I searched for my dad because I wanted to go home at five on the dot-the privilege I rarely deserved compared to my own working hours-and my dad told me to come upstairs and wait for him because we had ten minutes to go.

I didn’t know my way around the place that well since it had undergone a lot of massive changes ever since, but I managed to figure it out and as soon as I got there I was in for a big shock. How different the place looked now – my dad was placed in an open-plan area where everyone’s desks were adjacent to each others’, papers stacked messily on his desk, an old computer with a “Windows 98″ wallpaper on his monitor. The people that I remembered were always so friendly and jokable were now wearing glasses, each in their own desks with the same resigned state as my dad, no longer encompassing the same reaction I used to get whenever I had the fun occasion to visit.

I felt like my heart was just about ready to break.

I don’t know. Perhaps it was just them getting old. The state of the office. How much everything had changed. How my dad had worked there for over two decades and instead of getting more appreciated he was now being ‘demoted’ into a sad state that made me want to cry. My dad’s retiring in two years – imagine leaving a place where you’ve worked for over twenty years in the condition that pretty much states, “you’re just here because we’re waiting for you to retire so we can replace you with someone younger who doesn’t waste as much money on health insurance as you do”. And it wasn’t just him – it was his work colleagues who’d been there for as long as he was, with that kind of defeated and tired look on their faces, like they really didn’t like what was going on but they couldn’t do anything about it.

Maybe a part of me feels a cold blanket of fear surrounding me because that’s how I’d probably end up to be if I chose to go through the same path that he did. Maybe I worry as much as he does for what’s going to happen when he retires-and to think that it had never been such an important issue to me before. Maybe it was a part of another happy childhood memory taking off its rose-colored glasses-what was once remembered as something sweet had turned into something heartbreakingly sad. Maybe it was the remaining love of a daughter to her father. Maybe I wasn’t prepared to see another side of my dad I never really knew; that he was a human being too, with the problems I could identify with, with the frustration to something that was out of his league, that he was not as powerful as I – or any other little girls would – thought, no matter how negative or positive the statement would seem.

I could identify to the desperation that suddenly he’s that age and he’s about to retire soon and all his life flashed before his eyes, and now what? Where does life go after twenty years of hard work and suddenly the looming thought of being unemployed entered the mind and it doesn’t really go by the expectation of how life should be? I’m twenty four and the thought that I should make my own course in life scares the bejesus out of me, because I felt like I haven’t achieved anything and that I haven’t worked hard enough.

But my dad.

I mean, he’s fifty two. It kills me to want to know how he must have felt to be that age and still having the same fear that I feel, whenever I think about life.

I feel like I’ve aged several more years today, now that I know what he knows and I feel what he feels.

When he drove us home, he complained about the motorbike riders, how they pissed him off so badly but how he didn’t mind anymore about those assholes who drove their cars so recklessly, as if they owned the road. I tried to cheer him up by telling him about what I’d learned that day and how funny it was that his work colleagues didn’t seem to realize that we were related until we told them so. I snuck a look at him and felt a growing admiration to his patience of trying to deal with his abrupt change of mood knowing that he had high blood pressure and being in that kind of working condition didn’t back him down.

At that moment he was exactly who he was – my dad.

I had always liked the way the sun looked around that time because when you were in a car those little rays of lights got you more in the eyes but you didn’t really mind it because it was warm and soft and after being trapped in an air-conditioned room the warmth was enough to make you feel better.

I felt safe with my dad. Safe to know he was taking home – that we were going home.

I remember these days how much more worried I became, whenever he came home later than usual. How quiet the house felt when he wasn’t home, even though I usually got home after eight and he was already in bed, the lights of the TV flickered through the lattices on top of his bedroom door.

I remember even further back when he used to carry me on his shoulder and I would spread my arms and he would pretend we were aero planes. I remember when I was little we would go out in the evening looking for herbal drink and he’d get me the one with the raw eggs and honey. I remember just two weeks ago he and I went to have dinner, just the two of us, and I was telling him about my senior who was giving me a hard time and that we were actually having a father-daughter conversation. I remember how I couldn’t stop crying for three hours straight today – something I haven’t done in a very, very long time.

I know that none of what I’m writing is making any sense whatsoever, because it’s jumping all over the place, from one thing to another. I remember so much in so little time, and I oversee the things that had disappointed me in the past, because I choose to.

I’m writing this because I want to remember, what I felt and realized today, and how, even though I have ten more bricks on my back, I have never felt so light before. Because I remember, and I decide, right there and then, that I would do anything to make it work so that my parents wouldn’t feel like they have been living in vain.

This piece was written on Tuesday, August 8th 2006 at 08:00 pm

The whole togetherness of us that I hadn’t felt since I was small made my dad seem a lot more relaxed and opened. It was as if we almost didn’t have any communication barrier between us. Then something made me realize that after what we’d all been through, my dad was simply just a middle aged man who’d seen his children grew up and went their separate ways. His inability to reach out to them was something he couldn’t fix, the same ways that I couldn’t fix my own neurotic side.

Having been living overseas for six years, my arrogance had belittled and disrespected my dad and made me think of him as an old fashioned, conservative man whose views would never apply to the real world, let alone about life and most importantly, my life. I refused to acknowledge that he was probably struggling with his own problems too, emotionally and physically. Over the years I had seen him suffer from many illnesses and diseases and watched him age, and somehow the image of me sitting on his shoulders pretending to be an aero plane kept coming back and it was devastating.

I never thought that he might’ve wanted to be understood and loved too, despite all the things that had happened in the past that might have disintegrated the love that a daughter could reflect towards her father.

As my own life’s experience became richer, it came to my realization that whatever it is that I’m going through right now, in my own life – my parents nevertheless must have been through worse.

And all those things that they’d been struggling for, they’d done them all for me. How heartbreaking it must be for them to see their own little girl growing up with such bitterness and cold exterior, invisibly developing and becoming hardened as the years go by, and as she’d lost her innocence and cheerful self, the image of the little me in her kinder uniform, singing and prancing around to the school mars with the smallest attempt of a pigtail on top of her head – gone.

I bawled my eyes as I wrote this, not because I am having just another “child guilt tears”, but because I kept thinking about the time when I didn’t speak to my dad for months, and for something that seem so insignificant it signified what a selfish, ungrateful daughter I’ve become. It never occurred to me that neither of my parents ever had the same support and privilege that I’d received, yet I, with my own selfishness, have forgotten how tough it must have been for them to provide me with all the luxury that I have around me, and seem to want more and more.

Sometimes our own self-centered ways of wanting to be heard and understood – the whole “I’m your child therefore you must love me unconditionally” way of thinking has prevented us to try to put ourselves in our parent’s shoes. We forgot that parents, like us, were just human beings too, because we tend to turn a blind eye to their weaknesses, mistakes and errors. We forgot that they have only tried to love us in the way they thought was best, and ironically, we seldom put our best love for them, or even make an attempt to reciprocate, because we have always believed that our parents were there to love us regardless, no questions asked.

We dismiss, or perhaps truly forget, that they’d raised us since we were powerless little beings and there is really no greater love than parents would have to their children.

I hope that in this 24th year of my life, it’s not too late to show to my parents how grateful and truly blessed I am for having them, and how sorry I am for not wanting to understand where and how they really came from, nor what life must have been when they were my age, and no matter what happen I wouldn’t want to trade them for anything else in the world.