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…