Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: mother

Mother-shaped, but not an actual mother

I was talking to my mother last night and she asked me how I was doing. I don’t tell my mother anything of real importance. I have been having a really hard time sleeping in the last few weeks because of a personal tragedy and Daylight Saving. I told my mother I was having trouble sleeping because while it seemed personal, it really wasn’t. In other words, it was safe to share with her. Or so I thought.

Later in the conversation (this was around 10:30 p.m. my time), I said I was really tired. She said somewhat derisively, “It’s only 10:30 p.m.” I’m known for being a night owl who rarely goes to bed before 2 a.m., so she probably was saying it because of that. But. As I said, earlier in the conversation, I had spent five talking about how I was having such a hard time with sleep (which I pointed out again). It was clear to me that while she asked me how I was doing, she didn’t actually care. It was just the script she had to follow before she could dump her problems on me (again). She has parentified me since I was eleven. It hasn’t changed. When I am at my most emotionally stable, I can deal with it by viewing her as a sad old woman and not as my mother. I realize that’s a lot of qualifiers, but it’s what I need to do to get around the fact that my mother doesn’t love me as a person.

I came to that realization in my thirties or forties (so later than I would have preferred).Up to that point, I assumed my mother loved me because she was my mother. That’s what she was supposed to do, right?

Side tangent: It’s sad/funny/ironic that I never thought my father loved me, whichwas easier to deal with. It’s like any kind of ism in that I’d rather someone hated me to my face than be nice to my face and nasty behind my back. It’s better to know where you stand with someone than to labor under the impression that were anything but a bigot.

It’s the same with my parents. My father never professed to love me nor showed it–until my mid-twenties/early thirties. My relationship with my parents was horrible during that time for many reasons. My father was here after traveling to a conference somewhere in Canada, I believe.

I was taking him to the airport, and we got into a fight (as usual). I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but I think it had something to do with my mother. Or I may be mixing up our arguments. He did tell me once that the thing that caused my mother the most pain was that I was no longer a Christian.

I looked at him and said if that was her biggest problem, she was living a pretty easy life. I was offended and affronted, to be honest, in part because my father was not a true Christian. He converted because of my mother and only cared when he was in trouble and wanted God to get him out of it. He actually told me that’s what he liked best about being a Christian–telling God his problems and then being able to forget about them. In other words, he has a very childlike view of religion (which is not surprising).


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Bagua is my bag–bait and switch!

Bagua is my new everything.

That’s it. That’s the post. Ha! Not really.

I have fallen in love with Bagua as is my wont. When I am attracted to something (or someone), I am ALL IN. maybe not on the theory, but definitely in practice.

My teacher is dedicated to Taiji and Bagua. It’s what she does with most of her time, which I admire and aprreciate. I don’t know if I want to go that far, however, as it’s a part of my life (internal martial arts), but not the whole thing. I wrote about how she’s a gerat teacher in my last post. She puts up with my bullshit and questioning. I was the most recalcitrant student when I first started. I mean, that’s how I am in the rest of my life as well. I question everything after a lifetime of being gaslit by myy mother. And I mean that in the actual sense of the word. My mother will lie at the drop of a hat about what she has said and done.

Here’s the worst part, though. She is not aware she’s doing it. That’s not an excuse, by the way. It’s the literal truth. When my parents were last here, my mother and father had a screaming fight. My mother ran into the room where I was (living room), and my father followed. They were yelling in Taiwanese and I said loudly to my father that he needed to stop (which was probably not the best way to handle it, but it was really upsetting me as well.

My mother was crying and my father was shouting. He has dementia, which was markedly worse than it had been the last time I saw him. That was the summer before the pandemic so 2019. My medical crisis was autumn, 2021. So two-plus years later. The amount of decline was shocking to me, though it shouldn’t have been. He was getting worse and worse every year, so that much of a gap made it even more noticeable. But, as people who have loved ones with dementia know, it goes in and out without warning. One minute, he’s talking normally, and the next minute, he’s talking about something that doesn’t exist. I learned to go with it, but my mother could not. She claimed it was beacuse she could not lie to him, which was part of the abusive marriage.

I’m not going to get into that. Just suffice to say that after more than fifty-five years of marriage, she was completely worn down to a nub. Whatever fight she had in her was gone except for in very brief spurts that probably didn’t do any good in the long run.


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Not my mother’s daughter

One thing my mother does that irritates me is endlessly complaining about her various injuries/pains. Not the complaining in and of itself because I know how wearing chronic issues can be. No, the annoying part is that a lot of it is self-inflicted. My mother is a very busy person and refuses to cut down on anything. Plus she’s an anxious person who is constantly looking for something that’s going wrong and is ruled by her anxiety. I get the latter thing because I’m like that, too. The only difference is that I keep it mostly to myself whereas she emotionally vomits all over about it to me.

She’ll tell me about this or that injury and most of the time, it’s because she’s trying to do five things at once, her anxiety makes her radically change what she was about to do, or she’s rushing from one place to another. I tried to tell her Master Liang’s mantra of ‘no hurry, no worry’ and how it was better to do something slowly and with intention (and it actually saved time in the long run). I could empathize with her because I tend to try to do ten things at one time, especially if it’s carrying things from one area to another. I have several burns because of this as I tried to carry my coffee/tea mug in the crook of my elbow. It’s a travel mug, yes, but there’s still an opening so I can drink from it.

The next time I talked to my mom, she proudly announced that she and my father had modified the saying to ‘no hurry, no going too slow.’ I didn’t say anything, but I rolled my eyes at her. Don’t worry, she couldn’t see because we were talking on the phone. That completely missed the point of the saying, but I knew why she did it. It was her fear of not getting everything done, of missing something important, and of being lazy. She’s driven to be the one to count on and in doing everything. I understand that. But, what I was trying to drive home to her was that if you took your time and did something properly the first time, you actually saved time in the long run. And pain.


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