Is it really worth killing our dreams by achieving them? Or, is it worth letting our ambitions and unconscious obsessions that are pushed on us by the norms of the society slowly take control over us?
Amanda had such a dream (or an obsession to prove herself and the world); to become a good mother unlike her own.
Her mother was an alcoholic. One of the reasons why her father left her and wasn’t around. She was raised between an abusive birth mother and a social worker whom she called “her bonus mom”.
Considering what she’s been through, she turned out pretty well. At least that’s how it looked from outside. She was full of life, positive and always smiling. She had a very active social life, she even had a girls dance group with her closest friends that she adored. Even after they stopped dancing together as a group, she always cherished those memories and talked about them passionately, like she was actually living those moments again.
After she lost her birth mother, she got even closer to her bonus mom. She even made peace with her brother after years of not talking to each other and met her nephew for the first time. Things were looking up for Amanda.
But one day, she received yet another bad news about her family. Her father sadly passed away. Now, her brother and her bonus mom were the only family that's left.
Her father had a small farm and he left everything to her. Although it seems like a positive thing for her future, the loss of her father and the huge responsibility of dealing with all the formalities and paperwork to inherit a farm weighed heavy on her shoulders and slowly started taking its toll on Amanda. She was mentally exhausted and confused. She didn’t know what to feel anymore, and she slowly started losing her spark by falling deep into that spiral. Like shedding her skin, she was becoming someone totally different. That positive, always smiling person who's full of life was long gone. Instead, there was a dark and gloomy aura around her now.
On top of everything she had to deal with her father’s passing, Amanda was panicking about her age and her goal of having her own child. She was already in her thirties, and she was trying to find a partner who could make her dream come true. But there was either no candidate to help her fulfil her dream, or the ones she was together with weren’t ready for this kind of commitment.
No matter how deep she buried her childhood traumas, everything she’s been through were all rushing back to her. Those memories couldn’t be concealed. They were always there, alive and breathing, waiting for such vulnerable moments to strike. It turned out that all her positivity was just hanging by a thread in reality, and everything suddenly started crumbling down.
On an April day, Amanda couldn’t carry that mental and emotional burden anymore and took her own life. All the blame she put on herself since she was little due to the lack of love and care from her own parents led her to finally reach a point of no return. She had a psychosis and she thought she was the root of all evil in the whole world (even the wars, terror attacks and everything bad happening at that time). So, she thought she did something good for the world and ended it right there.
Becoming a parent and bringing a new life to this world is one of the biggest decisions that someone can ever make. But unfortunately, most people today take this big responsibility very lightly and go with it anyways (although they are not mentally or financially ready). The pressure from society has a big role in this. After a certain age, you are bombarded with questions like “when are you getting married?” or “when are you having a baby?” over and over again. And if you chose a different path for your life, you start doubting yourself and asking: “is there something wrong with me?”.
No one was born troubled or evil, but what kind of life you were offered when you were a child will determine what kind of people you’ll become. It all starts from childhood and shapes you through your life.
If Amanda insisted on reaching her goal to be a mother no matter what by ignoring her own issues, she would probably leave another child behind herself. Just like her parents did. And yet another troubled and unfortunate person would be in the making.
We have to fix our own issues first before we become a burden on someone else to be carried around their whole lives. Especially if we are planning to bring another life to the world. We have to ask the right and hard questions to ourselves and decide for our own good, not only to follow the norms of the society.
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