Managing Family Pressures & Guilt: You're Not Alone

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had two main goals in my life: to help others and to make my family proud. It is for that reason that I’ve been extremely family-oriented my entire life. Everything I’ve done so far has been to make all the hard work and sacrifices my family has made worth it. All throughout my life, my family always came first, regardless of the situation. As such, it was very hard to leave my family.

Knox College is located in Galesburg, Illinois, which is exactly 999.2 miles away from my hometown of Houston. More importantly, Knox is 999.2 miles away from my family. Of course, when I decided to study out of state, my mother was not pleased one bit. Yet, over time, she came to understand that if going away would further my education, then maybe it was for the best. My first few months of college were a bit rocky as they are for any other first-generation students away from home. Not only did I have to deal with being away from the comfort of my usual community, but I also had to learn to cope with the guilt of leaving my family. To be honest, even as a sophomore I still struggle with many of these issues. No moment defines the way I learned how to truly understand and cope with this guilt until the spring break of my freshman year.

On the last day of my spring break while I was home, my mother suffered a stroke. It was such a terrifying day. As the day progressed, so worsened her symptoms. The worst part of it all was that we had no clue what was wrong until she was placed in the Intensive Care Unit. Once we understood her condition, I had an important decision to make. Do I stay in Houston until my mother is stable and off a feeding tube or do I take time off of school to stay with my mother? Do I take the term off to care for her or do I catch my flight the next morning to continue my classes? On one hand, I couldn't refund or switch my flight to another time because of the type of flight I chose. On the other hand, if I left, who would help my dad speak and translate information with the doctors?

In the end, I decided to leave the next morning as scheduled. That is exactly what my mother told me to do when I asked her what she wanted me to do. She didn’t want me to put my life on hold. At the moment, I didn't understand her reasons but now I do. Over time, I came to understand that life back home is going to move on with or without me and there’s nothing I can do to change that. So I took to heart what my mom said because the best thing I could do at that moment was to focus on my education. In the end, regardless of how guilty and selfish I felt at the moment, I learned that sometimes you just have to keep persisting and trust that your family will be OK even if you aren’t always there.

I grew up caring for my family and I know I will continue to do so for the rest of my life, so if these next two years that I have left I want to focus on myself what's so wrong with that? Someone once told me that college is the only time in your life where it’s all about you; so it's okay to put yourself first, to go abroad, to apply for internships and to just be yourself. So now that's what I do; it doesn't mean I love my family any less, it just means that I’m simply living life.

Ashley Pineda is a contributing writer for the Alumni Stories Blog Series. Ashley is currently a sophomore majoring in Neuroscience at Knox College.