We Feature Daniel who tells us his story about his struggles of childhood, being raised by a deaf father and a depressed mother.
Where are you originally from and what was your childhood like?
I would say I had a happy childhood growing up. I was born and raised in Myanmar and came to Taiwan at the age of 18., I'm still a student here in Taiwan.
What was your relationship like with your father and brother?
I have a good relationship with my father. My father was deaf due to illness when he was five years old. My father is a person who often laughs and I love him very very much. As a child he often took me to the movies. That had something to do with my decision to study film, I wanted to make movies for my father. When my father became very sick, I lost the motivation to make movies and did not graduate from college.
As for my brother, our relationship has been very complicated since childhood.
What was your relationship like with your mother?
My parents got married through the introduction of their relatives. So when my mother married my father, she felt inferior because her husband was a deaf. My mother shouldered the burden of the family because of my father's aliment. She had a business and worked very hard while pregnant with my brother. Unfortunately, a severe car accident caused her left her disable on her left leg.
Already feeling inferior by marrying a deaf person, and now disability on her path. I don't remember she ever not having I would say now an inferiority complex during my childhood.
Did you and your brother ever feel embarrassed by your mother?
When we were young, my mother would say to us not to compare ourselves with others. She tried to instill to me that I wasn't better than anyone and over time, I felt looked down by her. The distance between me and her grew further and further away, and I will feel embarrassed walking beside her. This was mutual between my brother and I, we never told her how we felt.
How did it affect your self-confidence at the time, and your resulting behaviors and decisions?
Although my mother tried to degrade us, I never felt inferior. However, I did find that I have always had low self-esteem, because I try to cover up my inferiority with a loud voice and in the limelight. I gradually have found real self-confidence since I was baptized.
What made you change your views or mindset towards your mother? How did you repair your relationship with her?
One day when I was taking a shower, I was thinking about the important people in my life. What kind of picture they were in my mind? The most important people in my life are grandma, grandma (mother’s mother) and my parents. In my mind, there is grandma's smiling face, grandma's (mother’s mother) smiling face and father's smiling face, but there is no my mother's smiling face. So I asked myself why I didn't have a mother's smiling face in my mind, and I found that it was because I looked down on my mother and didn't get along well with her since I was a child.
After thinking about it, I felt that I had to restore my relationship with my mother to avoid regret. So the next day, I resigned and decided to go back to Myanmar to repair my relationship with my mother. I clearly remember that it was September 1, 2014.
The first thing I did when I got home was to apologize to my mother. I knelt in front of my mother and said sorry to her, because what you instilled us since childhood was that we were inferior, so I looked down on you since I was a child. I felt that it was a shameful thing to walk with you. Mom, I knew it was wrong. Anyway, I shouldn't look down on you. Please forgive me!
My mother touched my head and said, "Okay, I forgive you!
From that moment on, I could kiss my mother on the cheek, hold her hand to accompany her for a walk, accompany her to vegetables market, and teach him to sing. We spent a lot of happy time together.
On June 1, 2015, my mother passed away. I did everything I could do, so I didn't regret about my mother. Now whenever I close my eyes and think of my mother, I also think of her smiling face.
What final message or advice would you like to give to our audience and listeners
Live in the present and be kind to everyone around you. Also, restore relationships with parents or relatives you care about when they are still alive
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