The following essay was originally written for Professor Kevin Sweeney’s Ethical Dilemmas class. The author asked to remain anonymous.

It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day in Frankfurt, Germany, and I couldn’t wait to get the day started. It was the summer of 2006, and I was excited to be surrounded by my extended family. I had been there for only a few days, but I was already very familiar with Frankfurt because my parents had brought my siblings and me there every summer since I was 9 years old. I tipped the cab driver, who drove a Mercedes Benz, and stepped onto the sidewalk in my 6-inch designer heels. I was feeling good that day, and it was going to be a special day — or so I was told. On my way to a ceremony for my brother and his wife-to-be, I was especially dolled up because I was representing the family from “the great land of America.” I didn’t mind it, though; at 17 I was quite the show-off, and I couldn’t wait to be seen in my beautiful traditional dress and my professionally done hair and makeup.

To my surprise, my cousins who I had arrived to the party with disappeared into the house where the event was being held. The party was alive, and the place was packed. I was nervous and was whispering the formal greeting, “as-salamu alaykum,” to myself over and over. My cousins always laughed at my brother and me because our traditional language was broken, but I was determined to prove to my elders that we Americans are better than the Germans (a silly argument that never ended, especially when we watched soccer on TV, which was like the Super Bowl every week).

As I prepared myself to enter the house, my aunt came out with a man who was a friend of the family, but I barely knew him. I didn’t pay any attention to his awkward greeting, so my aunt rushed me into the house and told me to show my respect to the guests. As I walked in, my aunt behind me, the entire house shook with applause, laughter, and dancing. A handshake turned to hugs, hugs turned to tugs, and through some shuffle, I ended up on the chair, which looked like a throne with big letters hanging behind spelling “Congratulations!” and “Bride and Groom To-Be.” My entire life flashed before my eyes. I had to think of something, and I had to think of it fast. The guy sitting next to me, the one that I barely knew, was no help at all; I was not going to marry him. At 17 years old, I had some big decisions to make about my life. Every decision I could think of had a consequence; there was no medium. Emancipation was my destiny, and though I knew of the rights and wrongs that came with it, it was a decision that changed my life forever.

My family is a very traditional Afghan family, and it has always been so important to my parents that my siblings and I know our customs. They found that it was best we learn our culture through spending time with aunts, uncles and cousins, who mostly lived throughout Europe. If they only had known at the time that my generation of the family would soon become the most modern members of the family in history. There are a lot of things I wish my family and I had known at the time, and on that one day specifically. I had been a very rebellious teenager, and my parents and I were not on talking terms. I had a boyfriend, and in my parents’ country that was a crime that I could have been stoned to death for, but I was born and raised in America and my parents had no clue what to do with me. I wasn’t allowed to have many friends, so I definitely wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend. My cousin, who I was staying with at the time because I refused to go home, convinced me to take our yearly family trip to Germany and work it out with my parents.

So, there I was in Frankfurt, Germany, on my way to my marriage ceremony. I knew I wasn’t getting married right at that moment, but in my culture it was a way of showing union between families, and something about my father’s pride. I honestly never took the time to understand it, but what I do know is that respect and pride are a big part of the Afghan culture. Me being the defiant daughter I was made my father look weak. My father, like many of the men in my family, did not care about the consequences of certain things; he was a man of principle. He believed strongly that tradition must not be broken, that we must not forget who we are and where we are from. Arranged marriage just so happens to be an aspect of that tradition, and my father felt that he had a moral responsibility as a father, a brother, and a man to make sure his daughter is taken care of. He followed a form of deontology, which the philosopher Bruce Waller defines as “any ethical system that judges right and wrong acts in terms of principles and duties, rather than on the basis of the consequences of the acts.”

My father and I have very different views of the world, so our principles are not the same. He was raised in Afghanistan and I was raised in America, so even our traditions are not the same. That is why it is so important to think beyond the basis of principle. My father did not think about the greater consequences of his decisions, and in the end suffered greatly due to it.

In 2007 I was emancipated from my parents. I wore black silky pants and a beautiful pink cardigan to court the morning of the trial. I wish my parents had just signed the papers and avoided the trial process, but they didn’t want to let me go without a fight. I hadn’t seen them in almost a year, since the time I used my dad’s credit card to switch my return flight back from Germany. I didn’t want to see them. I was mad at them, I was afraid of them, and I was nervous. Trial was just one stipulation of the emancipation process, so I had to deal with it. At the time, I was living with a teacher from school and her family. I had never felt so uncomfortable in my life. My parents never let me go to sleepovers, so I wasn’t used to being in a different environment. This was just another part I had to deal with in my emancipation process. I felt bad for my parents; I knew they had no idea how to deal with the situation at hand. I was lost myself, but I had support from lawyers, mentors, and teachers at school. I avoided eye contact with my parents through all the proceedings.

When the judge finally granted the emancipation, both my mother and father burst into tears, and that was it: I was free. I was free to choose my own destiny, I was free to choose my own career, I was free to be myself and who I really wanted to be, an Afghan-American. As I sat relieved, thinking about a happier place in life, my parents were still heartbroken. They came over to hug me. My lawyers thought it was the least I could do, but the lawyers didn’t understand my language, the things my parents were saying, and how hard it was. The hardest part of it all was seeing my father cry, which had never happened ever before or after this moment in my life. As he hugged me one last time, he whispered, “Am I really a bad father?” I knew he was a good man and an even better father, but the changes he needed in his life and the changes that I needed in mine were far more important than us being together as a family.

Though the emancipation process was a difficult one, it made a big impact on the rest of my life. Though my family had many aspirations of me becoming a doctor and marrying a man of their choice and having many grandkids for them to look after, I always had different goals for myself. Though the emancipation was a success, life became very difficult for me. I struggled financially, I couldn’t focus on school, and I still needed a lot of help. Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote, “I do not know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” I can relate to this because when I was emancipated at 17 years old, I thought that life was going to be more enjoyable. It wasn’t. I don’t regret the decision I made, though. The emancipation helped me realize how much I loved my brothers and sisters and the aspect of family. It helped me understand and find myself.

The emancipation also helped my parents change and accept their life here in America, with different principles and different customs. They had to realize that they could not expect my sisters and me to live the same way girls our age lived in their country. I helped my sisters live more comfortably with my parents. I helped my parents to understand my sisters and their needs. In the end we made the best choices in a very difficult situation. My relationship with my family is better than I could have ever imagined it to be. We don’t talk about those days or what happened when I was growing up. It’s still a very emotional subject, but my parents understand now. We learned to look past it on both sides. There is still a lot we have to agree on concerning the future, but we’ve learned to work through the toughest part. One thing we can all agree on is that we are all happier united as a family than apart, so we can put our differences aside when it comes to a clash of culture and just be a family.