Dear children of immigrants, disappoint your parents.

Opportunities to disappoint our parents seem to grow exponentially as we get older and with higher stakes. When we’re younger, they’re disappointed we forgot to turn in our homework. Or we quit basketball. But time seems to invent new ways to disappoint our parents with every passing year. Dating someone unacceptable to them, not getting into your top school, moving out of their house or not moving out of their house, not getting the right job, etc etc. The opportunities expand and the right choice to make becomes cloudier and more unclear.

With these changes come guilt, shame, resentment, anger, a kaleidoscope of feelings on all sides. Our parents are watching us walk into the unfamiliar, break rules, navigate life a different way and it can be impossible for them to digest. It results in fights, vitriol, sadness, silent treatments. They might do everything in their power to reach for control over you. We, on the other hand, have a difficult choice to make. Do we live life on our terms or do we preserve our peace and their happiness at the cost of ourselves?

The growing chasm between us and our parents feels exponentially more vast when they grew up in entirely different environments. Parents who grew up in home countries before immigrating to the United States bring with them cultural and social values that can differ from those of the U.S. They followed strict social rules that dictated their lives. They might have completed educational degrees that maximized profit over enjoyment, or gotten married at a socially acceptable age in their home country, had their partner chosen for them by their own parents, and carried values about how parents should be taken care of. Whereas in the United States, arranged marriage isn’t customary, interest in your college degree is emphasized more than the promise of salary afterwards, intergenerational families aren’t typical, and individual success matters more than your role in your family.

Children of immigrants struggle to contend these values and rules that can seem so at-odds. If we make the choice that feels authentic to us, we risk alienating our parents and we could fail anyway. If we make the choice our parents want us to make, we become resentful, depressed, and struggle to trust ourselves. Nothing feels like the right choice and regardless we feel guilty, ashamed, and lost.

Those feelings are all parts of being human and having relationships. There’s no miracle cure and there’s no perfect choice to make. Instead, we can try understanding the shape of these feelings and even making friends with them. Maybe guilt looks like your mom laboring in the kitchen to cook you dinner after a long day of work. It’s your dad unable to visit home when his parent falls sick. It’s your parents stumbling through English because it isn’t their native tongue. These visions weigh heavy on us when we feel like we’re defying their wishes. While this guilt is hard to carry, it also tells us another story. It shows us that we care, that our relationship with our parents is valuable to us. That we acknowledge their sacrifices and have empathy for their experiences.

But our good behavior doesn’t rewrite their hurt. It doesn’t make the sacrifices “worth it” and we are not their promised reward, their American dream, for struggling. We are not the one thing they can control in an unfamiliar environment. Their reactions and their feelings are not ours to relieve them of. Our guilt does not dismiss the hurt they’ve caused us too.

Instead, we can acknowledge that we walked alongside them on their difficult journey and we carry the values— not the rules— that we were taught. We value stability, safety, community, reliability just like they do. But those don’t have to come from anxiety spirals when you don’t get an A in a class or sacrificing your interest in Literature to become an engineer or marrying someone in your culture.

Maybe instead of using guilt as a reason to not make the authentic choice, we bring it along with us. We could make our own choices, feel the guilt, and use the care we have for our parents to inform our relationships. Instead of disguising yourself as a perfect child, what if showing your parents the real version of you means you get to have a closer and deeper relationship with them? What if you give them a chance to accept your life as it is, even if it’s scary to break down that carefully constructed image they have of you?

We all know that we can’t be sold a fairytale where we lay it all out there for our parents and they hug us and tell us we can do whatever we want. The process of living authentically can involve living in deep discomfort, causing hurt, sowing disappointment. It means breaking old patterns of people-pleasing and parentification to get a little more in touch with your own pains and your own needs. It involves learning how to feel your feelings instead of dismissing them.

There is an alternate story where we build new relationships with our parents, instead of rehearsing the old toxic one over and over again. It doesn’t have to be plainly their way or ours. There can be something new.