Social Learning Experience in Retaining Relationships

Why I Cannot Leave My Mother
The family bond varies and is relative to from one family to another. Some families display qualities of being supportive to each other within the family, yet other families are disjointed and do not care about each other. The relationship that I have with my family is hard to understand and very challenging since they truly love each other but repeatedly hurt each other at the same time. I was shaken when I read “Reunion” by John Cheever which is an account of the life of a boy who decided to divert from the footsteps of the father. The story begins with the boy, Charlie, waiting for his father at the Grand Central Station. He is excited to see his father because it has been a long time since he saw his father. When they finally meet each other, his dad seems a little tipsy and emits strong whiskey stench. The dad takes Charlie to a restaurant near the station and while in there Charlie observes his father’s behavior as rude generally. Charlie’s father calls the waiters and waitresses by shouting in the restaurant and clapping his hands at them. This behavior is not acceptable in most restaurants hence they end up being kicked out of two restaurants. As they are to travel together on the train, the father wants to buy a paper for Charlie so that he can read on the train, but as is his trend, he becomes impolite again and his son cannot take it anymore. Charlie has no option but to tell his father, “Goodbye, Daddy” (Cheever 2), and goes to the train. They never see each other after that day.
My real life situation is similar to the Charlie and his father story. I will be going back to my home country, Korea, when this semester ends. My mother and I are genuinely thrilled to see each other. However, I deeply know my mother’s personality. I know we are bound to fight and hurt each other within a few weeks of my arrival, because my mom is analogous to Charlie’s father, the quarrels are inevitable. Charlie’s father shows off his white privilege, but my mother boasts of her authority as a parent. However, the problem is that Charlie is determined not to see his father again and become an adult, but I am not contemplating leaving my mother.
There are a few things that Charlie and I have in common. First, we have both tried not to communicate with our families. Charlie has not seen his father since his mother divorced him and there is nowhere in the text that indicates that he keeps in touch with his father. When Charlie wrote a letter to his father asking for a chance to have lunch together, it is the secretary to his father that answered Charlie. Similarly, I have been in the U.S for eight months, but I called my mother only three times over the entire period. One of the instances is when I called her to celebrate her birthday and she was startled and even asked me what was really going on that prompted the call, she never expected not appreciated the call. Before I came to college, I always lived with my mother, but even back then, I really did not talk to her much.
Upon obtaining the puberty age, the trouble with my mother got worse and worse. In middle school, I used to fight with my mother over mundane issues. For instance some day, I came back home after school and my mother scolded me because she thought I did not turn off the air conditioner when I left home. A claim that was not true since I could recall vividly having turned off the air conditioner. I stood my grounds and asserted that I had switched off the air conditioner but my defense resulted in nothing constructive. My mother did not believe me, not due to any tangible evidence she had but due to the fact that she always thought she is right. She always blames me when anything goes wrong because she strongly believed that she is never done anything wrong. She kept pointing fingers at everyone except herself, all the time and this particular instance really angered me. The anger boiled over and I found myself out of control and inevitably shouted back “Stop saying bullshit!”, an utterance that deeply angered my mother. Each time we had a heated argument, my mother used to send messages to my older sister who used to live in Japan by then. Traditionally in these texts, she omitted every bit of her errors and only highlighted my supposed fault. In this particular case for instance, she simply messaged my sister “Hyunji said bullshit to me”. It was very common for my sister to receive messages such as “Hyunji shouted me today” and “Hyunji said bullshit today” and such like one sided messages. Later on my sister confided in me that she thought I had lost my mind - she thought I had anger-control disorder. Later on my sister moved to the U.S and once in a while came to visit us in Korea. When finally I came to the U.S for my college studies, my sister went to Korea to visit my mother. Within a few days she messaged me that said she finally understood why I fought with my mother frequently. Back to the Charlie’s case, during their family “reunion,” when Charlie’s father is being obnoxious, Charlie never attempted to talk to his father. If Charlie talked to his father, maybe he could have understood why his father behaves invidiously.
Secondly, both Charlie’s father and my mother suffer from alcoholism. During the so called “reunion,” when Charlie saw his father, Charlie detected the smell of whiskey. Therefore, readers could notice that his father was being rude since he was under the influence of alcohol. In the same trend, my mother becomes really offensive and inconsiderate when she gets drunk. I recall an instance when I called my mother to send me $20 to help me buy some books that I needed for school. When I called her, she sounded incoherent and drunk. She is used to talking harsly and in a carefree manner whenever she is drunk, not caring the effect her words will have on the other person. So, in this instance when I asked for the $20 her response was “You are born to take away all my money”. She also said I was a monster and she did not know why a child like me was born and worse let to grow up to puberty, she wished I had died much earlier on in life. Those were harsh words that kept ringing in my mind; it was not easy dealing and comprehending such words from my very own mother. I never knew whom to turn to for help.
The reason why my mother drinks a lot is because of her previous job. In Korea, work colleagues often go out for a drink after work in teams. There is this common Korean term ‘Hwoesik’ which is used to describe these escapades by work colleagues. When the work hours come to an end, she used to frequently go for dinner and drink with her team. Thus, she used to drink at night even after she retired from her work. Back then, she was a bank clerk and it meant she had to deal with many people in the process of her work. In the process, she met people of different emotional disposition, a good number of the customers were rude to her, it used to hurt her emotionally. She got into drinking as one of the ways to relieve her stress. We had two dogs and even they avoid her when she gets drunk.
There are some differences however between Charlie and I. Charlie decided not to see his father again, but I cannot give up on my mother and want to put an effort to change my mother. If someone asks me, “So, you want to leave your mom? You hate her?” I would say, “No, I truly love her”. This I say because I do not want to leave or give up on my mother and not just because we are a family but there is more to it. The reason why I cannot give up hope on my mother is I deeply understand why my mother behaves as she does. Her entire life has been a continuous succession of attestation. My mother had to live all her life proving herself worthy. She was born in the 1960s. Back then, there was male chauvinism in a highly patriarchal society in Korea, (Chun H. & Monica Das Gupta M.D., 2009). The girls born at that time were considered as having been ‘misconceived.’ Education was not offered much to the girls born at that time. The family usually often sent the girls to the factory to earn money because the girls had to make money for the education of the sons within the family (“The Struggles of South Korea's Working Women.”). My mother’s parents were not different from other families. My mother was the second daughter, but the family always tried to deprive my mother of the opportunity to get some basic education because it was considered enough to give opportunity only to the first daughter. Accordingly, she had to study hard to get A since her parents has indicated that “If you don’t get A, we’re not allowing you to go to school”. To get some quality education, my mother was able to make it to one of the prominent universities in Korea. After she graduated, she got a job at one of the major banks in Korea. It is hard to find a decent job as women because back then, people used to think that women only do house chores and support her husband. But even after she got a job, she still encountered discrimination. This was to continue till 1993, when the policy called ‘Female banker policy’ was passed (“30????????????????.” ). Before then, women and men bankers were classified into different positions despite doing the same works, and different salaries were applied. Also, even though my mom did more work, other males colleague got a promotion because he was in the same military unit with his boss-South Korea has a conscription system due to North Korea. My mother retired after working as the bank branch manager. As a woman, it would have been very difficult to reach this position. To get to the branch manager, she had to continually demonstrate and prove that she is outstanding and worthy. Thus, when she believes that she is always right and being stubborn, I understand my mom.
However, understanding does not mean that I like it. I would like to fix my mother’s belief not only because I am annoyed when she get rude, but because I want my mother to realize that she is valuable even when she is not right. Fortunately, I live in a society that tells me, ‘Women can do anything’. I have much less chance of encountering sexism or misogyny than my mother. My mother was deprived of many opportunities in her field due to the gender bias. My mother doesn’t want me to live her life, so she gives me everything she can give me. Since I am deeply aware of what she has given to me, I cannot leave her like Charlie did. I cannot leave my mother.
It is pertinent to have a full understanding of the societal and environmental forces that help shape an individual to what they are. The projections that each person has on the people around them at any given point in life are as a result of childhood and lifelong encounters as posited by the Social Learning theorists in the field of behavioral science. They indicate that behavior is learned observationally through modeling. The theory has often been called a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it encompasses attention, memory, and motivation. Bandura, the chief proponent of this social learning theory, exhaustively covers the shaping process of most human behaviors as observed in the case scenario above (Health Communication capacity Collaboration, 2018). The individual, herein my mother, paid attention to the happenings around her during childhood and into her working years, she stored most of these in her memory and they acted as the motivation to behave as she did.
References
Chun H. & Monica Das Gupta M.D., (2009). Gender discrimination in sex selective abortions and its transition in South Korea. Women’s Studies International Forum 32.
Health Communication capacity Collaboration, (2018). Social Learning Theory. Retrieved April 21, 2018 from http://www.healthcommcapacity.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/SocialLearningTheory.pdf