What are the set standards of a normal, healthy parent-child relationship? Is it the constant showering of praises from parent to children? Or is it a silent grudge between the two? According to today’s standard, a healthy relationship between family members is when the individuals both listen to each other’s viewpoints and try to compromise conflicts. In Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden, My Fictional Grandparents by Laila Lalami, and Sixty-Nine Cents by Gary Shteyngart, the speakers define their past relationship towards their parents as one filled with regret, resignation, and bitterness due to their lack of gratitude, understanding of the world, and perspective of themselves.
In Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden, the speaker’s relationship to their father is based on their…show more content… On the way back to New York from Florida, Shteyngart’s family and friends stops by a McDonalds, which gets the speaker excited thinking they’ll be eating the sixty-nine cent hamburger, but instead finds that they’ll be eating a traditional Russian meal to his extreme embarrassment and disappointment. At that time, Shteyngard felt “…the coldness of a body understanding the ramifications of its own demise” (Shteyngard 55). when he realizes his protests didn’t matter to his family because they would never spend money, unless it was a necessity since they were all “…representatives of a shadow society” that always worried for the unseen future. Shteyngard and his parents thought differently of each other, to at one point when they were in McDonalds, his parents “…laughed at his haughtiness” and claimed he was becoming a “…strange man”. This furthered fueled the anger and bitterness Shteyngard had buried inside of him, which later turned into corrupting influence throughout his life because he was his parent’s
