#family relationships
It be like that.
I bet that at some point in your life you’ve thought that your family was weird, don’t worry you’re not the only one. Meet the Yamada’s!!
This is the ultimate family movie. When it started I thought ‘is this a thing for kids?’ Even though I watch movies made for children (child at heart <3) I was taken by surprise. It is nothing like any anime movie, Ghibli never cease to surprise me. No, it is not hand painted, the whole movie is made on computer and given water color effects.
It is a compilation of various incidents of the Yamada family. This is the story of a middle class Japanese family. What makes it special is its simplicity. The characters are well developed and you can’t help but smile at the quips. Shige, the grandmother is stubborn, wise and a little childish. The father Takashi is hard working and daydreams about taking a break. The mother Matsuko is a typical housewife, and every child can relate to her mom-hood! The siblings are great, Noboru, a teenage boy with witty remarks and his sister, sweet innocent Nonoko.
Sometimes the story gives us advice, sometimes it makes us laugh and sometimes it makes us emotional but it never bores you. You can understand the nature and personality of each of the characters, even the supporting characters in just 104 minutes. And the haikus just add to the charm of this movie.
I’ve gotta say, I wound up somehow being shown two whole articles about how Sad it is to be estranged from your kids on Mother’s Day and man were those WEIRD to read
Like, yes. I am SURE it is painful to not be contacted by someone who cut you off, who you had no reciprocal interest in cutting off, on a day when everyone else is fuzzily celebrating connection.
But if someone you raised for eighteen fucking years won’t even talk to you, lady, consider please that they must feel very hurt, and why that might be and what it might be about.
Vague “I know I carry fault because I didn’t know what I was doing” doesn’t seem like that, at least not to me. It may be true, but… there are a LOT of people in your life who aren’t going to be close with you, who you hoped would. That’s how things work. No one is REQUIRED to establish or maintain a bond with anyone.
You’re not entitled to it.
You may have grown and changed from the hurtful person you seem to admit having been. That’s an accomplishment, if so!
But I don’t think you’re in the place you should be until you understand that while you’re absolutely allowed to want that person’s time and attention and to be a total emotional wreck because you don’t have it… you’re not entitled to it.
If you can start there, you’re truly on your way.
I’m not exactly opposed to anything in this post, and really I agree with everything in it at face value, but… It kind of bothers me that I’ve long perceived a sort of double standard – in most spaces I’m around but particularly on Tumblr, the nexus of a sort of radical children’s-rights-ism – where (adult) children are allowed to cut off their parents but parents aren’t allowed to cut off their (adult) children. Or to put it another way, when a parent cuts off a child, it’s by default the parent’s fault, and when a child cuts off their parent, it’s also by default the parent’s fault (as is strongly implied in the OP).
I don’t want to speak for Fierceawakening here, so I won’t, but how many people could we imagine expressing those exact same views but with the roles reversed (leaving out the specifics of Mother’s Day)? I can’t imagine many.
Obviously I’m completely against parents cutting off their children while they’re still growing up or even when they’re early in emergent adulthood (this spring semester I had one student whose father severed all ties with her in the middle of the semester, and I was telling someone about this and we were agreeing that there’s really no conceivable justification for cutting off your kid in the middle of college unless you discover that they’re the Tinder Swindler or something). It is not okay to cut off your offspring when they’re still dependent on you, just because (I suppose?) you don’t like their choices or “lifestyle” or something.
But, a lot of the people I know of my age are more financially secure than their parents are (and yes, I know the generational trend goes the other way, but that’s far from absolute), and/or they’re considerably healthier and/or generally more able. Just because there’s a massive, massive power differential between parents and growing children, a dynamic that many parents abuse, doesn’t mean that the power differential remains operative between those relations for life.
The OP is right about considering the possibility that you badly hurt someone if they feel the need to cut you off despite close family ties (while I think at the same time we’d agree that you shouldn’t automatically blame yourself when someone else cuts off a relationship), but I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply in general between close, fully grown-up family members.
Sorry if I’m hijacking this by injecting a new element that wasn’t part of the feeling behind the OP, it’s just an aspect of the issue that I find myself noticing and thinking about from time to time.
