Family background matters a lot.
I was married for 24+ years and if there is any one lesson I have learnt from being married, It is that backgrounds matter a lot.
The way we are brought up and the experiences we had growing up shapes us and comes to the fore in our lives whether or not we like it. We see things from the perspective of our parents and environment and it’s only when we start to mix with others that we realize that a word, experience or behavior could mean different things to other people than we have known them to be.
We develop desires, drives and aspirations based on our childhood experiences and they affect the way we think and our expectations of others albeit unconsciously. As with most young ladies I was very naive when I got married. I thought marriage was all about Love. If you loved each other and wanted to live together you will have a happy marriage. I wasn’t at all concerned about backgrounds and the impact they had on marriage. I didn’t understand what I now know that our childhood experiences and backgrounds matter a lot and that we are who and what we are because of how we have grown and that most times our expectations of others stem from patterns that we have unconsciously imbibed. As far as I was concerned marriage was a case of girl meets boy, they fall in love, get married and live happily ever after .
It took me several years to come to the understanding that Mr Aisi wasn’t going to respond to issues the way I did, that the same experience meant different things to the both of us, that he felt very strongly about some things that I felt were no issue at all and that the depth of those feelings would affect our relationship.
How was I to know, that growing up Mr Aisi had watched his mother pander to his father whims and caprices and had expected same from his wife. How was I to know that his mother made a major production of serving his father his food and that he expected the same from me and that my not aligning to how he felt a man should be served in his house was disrespectful to him.
The food matter was a serious one.
My father in law had his own set of crockery and the table was set for every occasion. Every time he ate, he was served in dishes and most times his wife attended to him personally. On the other hand , I was brought up by a single working mother, who made sure that there was food at home, cooked the stews/soups and that was it . We made the accompaniments- rice, eba etc and served ourselves. No laying of the table, special plates, cutlery etc. The only requirement was that you served your food on a tray so you didn’t litter the floor when eating.
So when I got married , I served my husband his food from the pot and on a tray and I thought it was good enough but apparently it wasn’t and for years Mr Aisi felt he was not given his respect as the man of the house and that I treated him like every other inhabitant of the home. It took a lot of years for meto understand why he felt the way he did but one day he was able to put his feelings into words and the revelation had me gobsmacked.
My Aisi was not the traditional Yoruba man, but he told me of how when he was a child he used to look at his father’s meals enviously and wish for the time when his wife would serve him in like manner. I explained my upbringing to him and assured him that I didn’t mean to slight him when I served him the way I did. I quickly got him his own set of crockery and tried to serve him from dishes ( most times sha) but it made me realize the strong hold our upbringing can have on us.
If we want to live peacefully with people we must understand that the way they and we have been brought up affect our perspectives and approach to life. We have many misunderstandings because we expect people to behave in a particular manner and when they don’t (most often because we don’t express our expectations or they don’t understand why we have those expectations ) we get upset. We expect people to react to situations, think or express themselves and do things the way we do or the way we would, and if they don’t we call them barbarians, uncivilized, uncultured etc. We expect people to understand our childhood culture without explaining it to them. We expect our husbands to behave like our fathers and our wives to behave like our mothers. We expect that the traditions that were held sacrosanct in our homes would be given the same place of honor in other people’s homes.
We need to change that mindset. There may be childhood trauma beneath our most irritating behaviors. Our childhood experiences and the way our parents and other adults related to us may have imprinted certain thought patterns and behaviors on us and we either conform to the behaviors modeled before us or rebel against them. So depending on how we were brought up we could become people pleasers, controlling, emotionally detached or inconsistent in our emotions.
Today, I urge us to look back at the things that bother us in our spouses or the people we relate with and try to understand why they act the way they do. It will amuse us that most of them don’t even have a conscious reason as to why they demand certain behavior and actions from us. A good examination of their history will reveal that most of our misunderstandings are not worth having.