Today is the day. In seven-ish hours (by the time you read this, it will have been yesterday), I will be on the way to the airport and hopefully a few hours later, I will finally, finally, have the house to myself. It’s been three months since that fateful night that changed my life forever. Except, it didn’t? I’ve been living with the duality for three months now of everything changing and nothing changing. That fateful night.
Pardon me for going over it again, but I still can’t quite believe it. No matter how many times I recite the domino effect of events, it still hasn’t sunk in. As a refresher. I got pneumonia somehow.
Side note: It’s still freaking me out a bit that I don’t know how I got it. I was so careful with COVID precautions. I only went out once a month to the pharmacy to get my meds. Then, once I got vaxxed, I loosened up a tad. I went to Cubs twice and to pick up lunch with my brother once. That’s it. How the hell did I get pneumonia? And I hadn’t been to the pharmacy that week. I mean, maybe it was nesting for over a week, but that’s not usually how my bronchial issues go. Then again, how would I know? I mean, if I am sick for a week and don’t know, then I don’t know.
Apparently, there are different kind of pneumonia, including getting it from mold? If that’s the case, that’s probably how I got it. Or it might have been a week or two before and just incubating. I did email my Taiji teacher the Tuesday before the Thursday night/Friday morning (3 a.m.) it happened to say I was unusually tired and could not make Zoom class that night. So I had an inkling, but only just.
When I was in my twenties, I used to joke that I was attracted to the exact wrong person for me. Gay men, straight women, anyone who was taken, or someone who was simply not interested in me*. If I walked into a room with 100 people and 99 were eligible dating partners, I would inevitably beeline towards the one who wasn’t.
In my late 20s/early 30s, I declared stridently that I didn’t want to be in a relationship. I was an independent woman, damn it! I didn’t need no (wo)man to make me complete. Of course, underneath it was my terrifying hunger to be in a relationship. I was told all my life it was the only thing that mattered, well, along with squirting out children, of course. It was confusing because I was also told I WOULD go to college, but at the end of the day, I better be married and have children.
Side note: When I turned 26, my mother started pushing me to have children. It reached the point where I began dreading talking to her because she would bring it up. Once summer when she visited, she mentioned it every goddamn fucking day. Her comment when I turned 26 was that she had my brother at that age. My immediate (internal) response was, “I’m not you, thank god.” I have been fortunate that I realized fairly early (21 or 22) that I did not want children. It was such a relief when I finally truly realized I did not have to spawn, I nearly cried. My mother did not stop trying to get me knocked up for the next fifteen years. I only relate this to underscore how much pressure I felt to marry (implicit in the preggers convos) and have children. The only time I ever had an impulse to have children was after my mom had been nagging me for days about it, and I thought, “I should have a kid just to shut her up.” Fortunately, I came to my senses and realized that having a child to please my mom would be a recipe for disaster.
I want to be clear. I was not a great girlfriend back in the day. I was too clingy and too eager to merge into one being. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of social support for a woman offering endless emotional support without receiving any in return, especially twenty years ago. In addition, there is the idea that you’re supposed to be the ‘cool girlfriend’ who is ‘chill’ and doesn’t get upset about, well, anything. It’s a neat way of keeping a woman firmly in her place (in a het relationship). Still. I fell into many of the traps of het relationships of that time, and I was not my best self in those relationships.
Many times, I was just desperate to be in a relationship, any relationship, because my self-worth hung on what my partner thought of me. I put up with a lot of shit that I shouldn’t have because I thought I didn’t deserve better. It was a vicious cycle, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. Hell, I wasn’t even aware of the problems for a long time. Once I became aware of my own issues, it was hard not to see it in myself all the damn time. I worked hard on it through a lot of therapy, but some of the issues are so deep.
I read a lot of trashy teenage romances when I was a teenager–and several Harlequin Romances as well. I had my first crush on a boy when I was in first grade, and it lasted until I was in seventh grade. It only died out because we went to junior high school, which meant I didn’t see him nearly as often as I did in elementary school. I can still remember his name and how he looked, which is indicative of my passions in general.
My parents did not have a good marriage (and that’s an understatement if I’ve ever written one), but I completely bought into the idea that you had to be married in order to be a complete person. To be fair to me, it was pushed on me by my mother since I was rather young. She might not have explicitly said it, but it showed in everything she did. She had a full-time job, but she did all the housework and parenting as well. She arranged everything around my father, and I can remember the countless arguments when he would come home late at night without a single word of explanation other than he was ‘working late’.
I saw my mother frantically turning herself inside out to try to please him, and when I was a preteen, I became her unwilling confidante, and she poured out her woes to me on a regular basis. She was deeply depressed, and I begged her to divorce my father. It didn’t happen, unfortunately, and I continued to learn warped ideas of what a relationship should be. I had two cultures telling me that it was my job and duty to please my man and to keep him happy at any cost. It was better to be in a miserable relationship than to be alone, and as much as I didn’t want to believe it, it seeped into my soul.
To make matters worse, I was a fat*, ugly**, awkward Asian girl in a lily-white suburb. It was before Asian girls were exotic and hot–back then, we were just not considerable dating material. That’s actually not completely true as I knew a very popular Asian girl who probably had many dates, but it’s true in the sense that we were not the norm, so it would take someone thinking outside the box to ask us out. I had my first date when I was sixteen, and because I had internalized a lifetime of ‘you’re a loser if you don’t have a boyfriend’, I clung to him as hard as I could. The first kiss was disappointing, but it got better. He was a good-looking, smart (fucking smart), kindhearted boy, and I had a hard time believing he wanted to date me. I met him at summer school, and he went to a school thirty minutes away from me. Little did I know that long-distance relationships were to be a staple of my dating life.
I’m a lifelong single person with brief periods of coupledom, and for most of my life, that’s the way I’ve preferred it. When I was in my teens, I despaired of ever having a boyfriend*, and when I was asked out by a boy at the not-so-tender age of 16, I was ecstatic. Not only was he cute and smart (oh, boy, was he smart), but finally, I felt like a normal teenage girl. I met him in summer school (T-CITY, Twin Cities Institute for Talented Youth. He was in physics, I believe, and I was in theater or writing or Latin). He went to a different school, which means we only saw each other on the weekends. It’s funny because most of my relationships have been long-distance, and this probably started the whole thing. I’m more comfortable with people if they’re not too close to me, if you get what I’m saying, and I think you do.
We dated for two-and-a-half years, and despite him being a great guy, I started not feeling it near the end of the relationship. I was working at a Claire’s in a shopping mall, and there was this really cute boy who worked at the shoe store down a level. He was a tall drink of hello, cutie, and I would flirt with him whenever I had a break. I was anorexic at that time and actually wore makeup at that point, so I was cute as hell in the stereotypical way. He was definitely into it, and while I didn’t do anything because I was in a relationship, there was definitely a zing there.
My boyfriend was going to Stanford for college (did I mention that he was super-smart?), and he insisted I had to go to school near him or we’d have to break up. I had applied to schools around his, and I got accepted to the one in CA (one of the UCs, Santa Clara, I think), but the closer it got to the time to leave, the more I started panicking. I wasn’t ready to be out of state. I wasn’t in love with him any longer. I didn’t want to go. We had several emotional discussions about it, and we ended up breaking up. I asked out the shoe shop guy after that and ended up going to his place. We made out, and he made it clear he wanted sex. I wasn’t into that, and we ended the date, amicably, I thought. Well, he rebuffed me after that, so it was pretty clear what he wanted.
During my twenties, I thought I should be in a relationship. It’s what you’re supposed to do, right? At that time, it was still the norm that a woman’s first obligation is to get married (in my Taiwanese culture as well), and the joke, “I’m going to college to get my MRS degree” wasn’t so much of a joke, frankly. I had several bad relationships in my twenties as have a lot of people, I suspect. In my thirties, I thought I *should* be in a relationship, but I wasn’t really sure I wanted it. In my early twenties, I realized I didn’t want kids. In my mid-twenties, I realized I didn’t want to live with someone. In my late twenties/early thirties, I realized I didn’t want to get married for political and personal reasons. I still felt I should be in a relationship, however, because only losers were single for their whole lives. I would loudly declare that I didn’t want to be in a relationship while secretly wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn’t be in a relationship while simultaneously dating exactly the wrong people. Yeah, I was a mess, yo, and I didn’t know how to get out of it.
I never played with baby dolls when I was a little girl. They never appealed to me, nor did actual babies. They were screaming, squalling, dribbling balls of snot, and I didn’t like them at all. I also never pretend-played having a wedding with my Barbies. I know many little girls dream of their perfect wedding, but I didn’t care about it at all. The only thing I did with my Barbies was cut their hair after coloring it black, and I made them have sex with each other. All that girly shit didn’t matter to me, and it wasn’t until a decade and a half later that I realized I was supposed to care deeply about these issues. When I was twenty, I realized that I didn’t want children. At all. It was a weird revelation because I just assumed I had to have them, given the societal pressure as well as the maternal pressure. When it ht me that I didn’t have to have them, a feeling of relief overwhelmed me. I didn’t have to have kids! It was as if a life sentence I didn’t know I was under had been lifted. I didn’t think it was a big deal until I started telling other people, and I was met with a range of reactions from disbelief to condescension to anger. That’s when I realized that what I did with my body was deemed to be communal property, and I heartily rebelled against that. I also bristled at the idea that I didn’t know my own mind, that my biological clock would one day overwhelm me, and that all I would be able to think about was squeezing out babies Duggar-style. It made me indignant that other people thought they knew me better than I knew myself, and even if it was true that I would change my mind at some point, why couldn’t they accept that at the time, I didn’t want to have kids?
As it was, I never changed my mind. I’m forty-five years old, and the only time I had even an inkling to have a kid was when my mother wouldn’t stop pushing me to procreate. It got so bad, I thought of having a kid just to shut her up. Fortunately, I realized that was a phenomenally stupid reason to have children, and I never thought about it again. It’s hard not to say this without sounding defensive, but the only time I think about not having kids is when someone else brings it up. I love not having kids with a glee that is unbecoming. It’s not because I hate kids; I don’t. I just never wanted them. Plus, I knew I’d be a bad mother, though I’m a pretty great ‘crazy aunt’. Once I hit forty, the question of my fertility became a moot point, much to my relief. I did have an impulse to send out cards to people who were sure I’d have kids gloating over my child-free state. It passed, thankfully, and I went on my merry way.
