Assignment 19 - Hannah Whaley - bad advice is just as effective

The prompt for this blog post didn’t specify that it had to be GOOD advice. This advice was certainly a gem. And it certainly made some impact on me. For some background context, my mother is the youngest of 5 kids born in Iraq. The oldest is 20 years older than her and the next youngest is 7 years older. The Kurdish culture requires you to respect your aunts and uncles. They are family and they are older than you. Respect them, listen to them, clean for them, eat until you puke for them - whatever they want. The oldest sister of my moms siblings advised me, at a young age, to treat all family well. Blood is more important than anything else. But then, I watched how she treated my own mom, her younger sister. She treated her with blatant disrespect. Always. I even was told a story. When she was 30, the oldest sister bullied my preteen mother constantly and called her ugly, fat and destroyed her self esteem. When I saw this aunt this past summer, she called my sister and I trash and disgraces to the family. What’s funny is she did it in another language, knowing my sister and I don’t understand. She constantly talks badly about her daughter-in-law, who is nothing but precious. She’s a mean snake. She used to lock her oldest daughter in rooms and refused to take her in public because she was too ugly and too fat. So I looked at the advice she gave me - to put family above all. Well, I don’t like to think that I am even related to that woman. If blood was what connected us so strongly, why was she showing my mom and sister and me disrespect and hate? So I now know blood may bring people together, but being related in no ways means that you have to love somebody. That’s the life lesson I took away from her advice and how strongly it clashed with her actions.