When I was growing up my parents had certain expectations for us that were…
strenuous to satisfy.
Because both of my parents were seriously high functioning academic humans, they expected their children to be the same way. It was invalid if any of us failed a test, got a C on our report card, or desired to play on a sports team instead of the academic bowl, and as you can imagine, these expectations only grew as my friend and I got older. By the time my friend and I were going off to college, my parents expected us to be various steps down the path towards a highly successful professional career, certainally one in math or engineering… Personally, I gave in to their demands plus became a scientist. My sibling, however, was insistent that he wanted to be an Heating & A/C specialist, however he had been obsessed with air quality control appliances from an early age plus was seriously mechanically minded. He took wonderful joy in disassembling our boiler plus a/c unit plus putting them back together since he was a little kid. Most parents would find this natural air quality control efficiency seriously impressive, however my parents thought that it was shameful. They did not want my sibling to work in manual labor, even if it was a skilled trade like the heating plus cooling industry. Well, he found a way around that. My sibling ultimately went to college plus became seriously specialized in biomedical research ventilation plus air quality control, rather than plain outdated residential boiler repair, but now, he works in a better lab than I do, plus he makes three times as much.
