Pressure Under Our Parents

by Edith
(New York City, NY, USA)

I'm a middle school female student and I'm Asian. I was born in America so my mom always gives me difficult goals for me to accomplish. My mom makes me take classes all the way to Saturday and I'm not allowed to watch movies, play games, listen to music or even go online reading fictional stories. She expects me to come back home and spend 4 or 5 hours researching notes. I am not able to go out with friends or even have sleepovers or visits. I never went out by myself, but I never either spend time with anyone. All my friends are in groups of 3 and they always dump me around.

Every time my mom wants to talk about my grades, I tell her it's fine and go to the bathroom and take a long warm/hot shower (if you want you might take a cold one, but you have to drink warm drinks afterward). In the shower I can calm myself from all that pressure and let myself relax by not thinking, and just whine about it in the shower.

After the shower it feels like it's different from before, and that's the only way that has kept me from suicide. I've been having such pressure since 5 or 6 because I don't have a dad, and I always spend time by myself. I've been knowing how pressure is like and how the social world is like. If you took an extra long shower, your parents would just think you want to be clean.