Have I just wasted the last 9 months of my life?

Far from it.

But my host mom (the phrase seems more absurd to me every time I have to use it) said something to this effect to me today. She says that I should have done more in the past year and that I didn’t take adequate advantage of my time in Buenos Aires.

This kind of judgment is nothing new. Irma has an opinion about most aspects of my life, whether it be my social life (you need to go out more, you need to have more American friends) to my use of my time (you should spend less time on the computer) to my hygiene (just washing your hands after you use the bathroom is not often enough!) Apparently I also never study, don’t sleep, have no real friends, and am a "Bush supporter".

But while these kinds of observations aren’t new what was new was my reaction to them, if not externally at least internally. I have tended to react defensively to claims that I ought to be living my life in a way differently than I am. I will argue fiercely that I do get some sleep sometimes, or that I have friends and I’m not bothered by the fact that they’re mostly not Americans. I get kind of upset and am arrested for long periods of time thinking on the matter and whether or not she’s right. Perhaps this post is an extension of that defensiveness; I’ll let readers judge that.

Today though, when she said that I wasn’t taking advantage of my time in Argentina, I looked at her statement a different way than is my habit. I realized that Irma (and perhaps these previous students to whom I am compared) had a different idea of studying abroad than I do. Many students (as she reminds me) travel frequently throughout the country in groups of fellow study abroad students. In this sense studying abroad is a bit like an extended vacation.

I do not see myself as on vacation, but more like I’m just living in a place that isn’t Cleveland. I have friends I hang out with, I have regular activities I involve myself in and I eat at the same places most of the time. When I reflected on what Irma said, I realized that I just didn’t have the same goals as she thought I ought to.

It’s a powerful thing realizing that your desires, interests and goals aren’t necessarily in line with the desires of the people who claim to have your best interest at heart. These people are usually your parents. For me the bigger change was realizing what these desires were. For the majority of my time here I have sort of passively accepted someone else’s definition of how I ought to live my life and simply lamented the fact that I wasn’t living up to this. I am increasingly becoming more confident in asserting

It’s the same sort of thing we have to do with our parents. Many of us aren’t confronted with this very often and so may be quite used to defining our desires for ourselves. But having lived with my parents my entire life I have always defined my desires in contrast to theirs. It’s ironic then how much living with a woman who isn’t my mother has taught me of how to be free of my own not primarily what she actually says but what I still believe in the back of my mind even when she’s thousands of miles away.

If you wanted any more proof that we live with our parent’s desires in our heads, no matter how far away they are physically, just think of what is said about the dead. Within literally minutes of learning of my father’s death I was told that I should still go study abroad because “it’s what he would have wanted”. I’m still trying to make him proud of me, even though he’ll never be around to see it.

I even made him a kind of promise, after he’d forever lost the ability to hear it, that I would try to obtain from my year abroad, something he’d always wanted for me: independence and self-reliance, the ability to handle myself, to decide that I will do a thing and go out and do it. That’s a charge that I intend to keep.