Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father (from Brainpickings)

In Indonesia, we consider family is the ultimate nuclear group where children could find refuge and support. We also assume that seniors would be taken care of the children, and babies from young family will easily find support from the grandparents, if not from babysitters. Our social policy also hinges toward the assumption that every individual has a familial safety net. When that's not always the case. With this thought, we tend to be dismissal with policies that could cover individual's interest. We do not imagine a differently-abled person or a senior walks out of their home alone. There is no such thing! Since we assume they have family. We assume they have a nice, decent, non-abusive family. Hence, we do not create infrastructure for individual people. Instead, we promote that marriage will give the solution for better life (since you'll have a spouse and children who take care of you). We also glorify communal value, when not all people feel comfortable in social bonding. Meanwhile, I have always believed that detachment from social life is important as well, to respect individual thought, privacy, and empowerment. 

Brainpicking just shared Kafka's letter to his abusive and narcissistic father. Good entry to de-romanticize family.  Not all family is nice and glam as our new order Posyandu ad. The spectrum of "abusive" is not necessarily physical, but broader and more delicate than that, as what Kafka wrote below:

"To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas… If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.

This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is — not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that — but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches."