I Need A New Family

While riding in the car this morning on the way to school, I felt like I was ignored again. Yes, I know it is partly because I do not really speak or anything in public (even though I do feel sometimes that I talk too much as it is), but still, it would be nice to feel like I am a part of something bigger.

My sister and my mom seem to be growing closer, yet I seem to be growing farther away from the family as a whole. This kind of sucks. Okay, I take that back. This really sucks.

As part of an Asian background, I was told and always believed that the family is, above all else, a unit. The parents and the children, however many there may be of each, are a single identity. Each are involved in one and the others life in one way or another. Each cannot live without the other's support, love, understanding. The family unit, as I see it, is one where no matter how many fights you get in to, you still love each other. Respect should be taken as granted in a family, because, as I've been told too, you don't necessarily have to like the person in order to respect them. Many teenagers and young adults hate their parents for one reason or another, but yet they still respect them. Even though I don't display it the way I should by other standards, I respect my elders. When I say that "respect should be taken as granted," I really mean that it should go without saying. Every family has to have respect for everyone in the unit, or else you can't really function as one homogeneous unit.

Still, as much as I respect everyone in my family, I really wish they made me a part of their lives more growing up. It seems that we have all drifted away from each other since we moved down to Nashville. My aunt is off doing her own thing. My mom is working so hard it makes me want to give her a vacation again, thanks to this new job of hers. My sister has her own social life and has had a boyfriend when I can't even boast that! And my dad pretty much sits there in the kitchen making sure the family has some kind of income thanks to the family owned store. Me, I'm off in my little bubble in my room above the garage making art that no one in my family knew I was capable of producing! Then again, they don't know a lot about me.

I guess it's too late to wish for a new family, but the one I have right now, however great in its own way, just doesn't feel like one. At least, not at the moment.