I do like my parents, but sometimes it's hard. I do like my mom more than my dad, though. My mom has always been on my side, and has always been kind to me and supportive of me. She's always stuck up for me, too. My dad and I, on the other hand, had a rocky relationship growing up. He was almost always yelling at me for one thing or another. Looking back, I did deserve it sometimes. But there were also times when he didn't need to yell. Even though I do see now that I was in the wrong at times, I still feel like he went too far a lot of the time. I've felt he has more conditional love for me and seems to put more expectations on me. He yelled at me just for withdrawing from a single class in my first semester of college, even though the classes I take are my choice, not his. He's always done stuff like that. He's always felt more controlling as a parent, unlike my mother. She's usually there for me and she supported at me when my dad was yelling at me for withdrawing from a class. Her love seems more unconditional and she's always been nicer to me than he has. This is why I get along better with my mother than my father.
My mother does have her challenges, though. She sometimes has racist moments, which really disappoints me. She actually said to me once, "If you ever bring a black girl home, I'll disown you", which made me lose a lot of respect for her. My grandmother can be like that sometimes too, so it may just have been the environment she grew up in. Either way, the racist side of her disgusts me. I always speak up to her about when she shows it, and when I do she doesn't seem to take me very seriously. I really don't like that about her. Even though she can be like that, I still care about her. She's still really nice to me and supportive of me. I still love her. Despite the difficult times I've had in the past with both of my parents, I still love them and care about them very much. It's just kind of hard to like them sometimes.
Regardless of how I feel about both of them, though, I've felt distant from them ( and the rest of my family) for a while now. I do get along with them fairly well these days, but I wouldn't say we're close. I don't have a lot in common with them, and because of that I've begun to feel more and more like a stranger in my own home. I don't talk to them as much as I used to and I don't spend a lot of time around them anymore. I do still like them, I just don't feel as close to them as I used to.
