Many things have changed in the past three months, though not externally. You may not be able to see it with the naked eye, but I can definitely feel it. To put it bluntly, it’s my family. Before I ended up in the hospital, I had reached an uneasy truce with my parents. My mom called once every three or four weeks and we talked for a half hour, mostly about my father because that’s all she ever wants to talk about. Then I talked to my father for up to ten minutes, hoping he wouldn’t say something incredibly foul that I had to ignore with difficulty or confront with no hope of any positive results.
My mom would email me when she needed something, mainly editing, but other than that, I wouldn’t have any interaction with them, which was exactly how I liked it. When I woke up in the hospital and saw their faces, my heart sank. It was immediate and instinctual, though I hid it from them as I had years of training in not showing my emotions on my face. I can do it most of the time except when I’m really tired. Then, it’s really difficult for me to keep my emotions under control.
I have said more than once that the physical recovery from my medical trauma was relatively easy. The stamina took some time to recover, but other than that, there wasn’t much else I needed to worry about. The minor things that were wrong with me went away on their own. I do have a numb/tingling patch on my right thigh, but I’m not too worried about it. What I’m more worried about is the family. Well, worried is not the word for it. I’m resigned to the dysfunction, but it wore me down and was an obstacle to my recovery.
Someone on Twitter said that the worst thing about family abuse was that you always hoped it would get better–even after the abuser died. He was so right and it stuck with me. My last therapist said something similar in that she commented how my mother would never be the mother I wanted her to be so I had to accept her for the mother she was. It stung, but it’s what I needed to hear.
Side note: Here’s the funny thing (funny meanly bitterly ironic) about the family dysfunction–nobody thinks my father can change. My mother wants a miracle to make him not him (and she points out that I was a miracle in being alive, which, while true, is no reason to think she’s going to get another miracle concerning my father), but we all know he’s been like this for his whole life, which is 82 years. He’s not changing. So any discussion the other three of us have about him (or two if it’s my brother and me) is predicated on that knowledge. He’s a narcissistic, thin-skinned, overly-sensitive, unrepentant asshole who is also misogynistic, racist, and would be homophobic if he had to acknowledge that queer people existed. There is very little redeeming about him and we all know that.
The point is that we all know he’s not going to change. He’s the proverbial missing stair and we just keep working around him. My brother and I fully acknowledge that we’re doing this while my mother twists herself into pretzels to defend him. When she’s not sobbing about him. I know I sound callous, but it’s decades of listening to her complain about him only to have her turn around and defend him if I agree with her.
I will never forget the incident that made me fully realize I couldn’t trust her. My father was raging at her as was his wont about not having his driver’s license. It’s a long and not interesting story why he didn’t have it, but the reason we kept it from him is because he can’t drive. He’s a menace on the road. Years ago, when I was in in a minor car accident, he drove us so we could check out new cars. He was going thirty on the freeway, which was terrifying me. Yes, he had just slowed down to exit, but he was only going fifty or so before that. Plus, his reactions are completely shot. Look, I’m not a good driver, but I’m better than either of my parents. Anyway, he shouldn’t be driving, which he refused to accept.
Anyway, on that particular day, he was yelling at my mother so she ran into the living room where I was and he followed. He was still shouting and I told him to cut it out. He told me to stay out of it and god dammit, I should have. But I couldn’t let him abuse my mother so I raised my voice and told him to cut it out. I found out later from my mother that he had been yelling about how he was a slave and we were keeping him hostage in the house. Which was all nonsense because he didn’t do a damn thing and my mother shouldn’t have told me, anyway, but that is neither here nor there.
It was a terrible scene, but that wasn’t the worst part. Later, when my brother came over, my father wanted to discuss the incident and explain to my brother what happened. I knew he was going to be full of shit so I tried to cut him off and say we didn’t need to talk about it. Which he did not like at all. What he said was that he was concerned when my mother hit the curb as she was driving and that he might have sounded like he was yelling because he was hard of hearing and she talked too softly, anyway.
Now. Here is what I did wrong. I should have just shut the fuck up and not said anything because it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter. But I was so gobsmacked by him just making shit up out of thin air and lying to my face that I said that wasn’t what the fight was about at all. I laid it out brutally and he got huffy, especially when I said he yelled at me. He said in a hateful tone (t hat I particularly loathed), “Did I use any crude words?” As if that was the only thing that mattered. Later, my mother came to me, looking very unhappy. She wanted me to apologize to HIM for trying to stop him from spouting his bullshit. When I pushed back, she shouted that all she wanted was peace.
Then, a few days later, she wrote an email to my brother and me lecturing us about being more loving and respectful of our father. When I pushed her on it, asking about why he didn’t have to respect us, she said it’s because of his pathology. I was ‘normal’, you see. And also, something something culture Taiwan older people bullshit. Oh, and also, I yelled at him which was somehow equally as bad as him yelling at me. When I pointed out, incredulously, that I had yelled at him in defense of her, she admitted she had forgotten that part. And tried to excuse his bullshit by saying he really couldn’t remember the actual fight. Which, apparently, she couldn’t, either.
That’s when it hit me that she was just as wedded to the dysfunction as he was and there was no point in arguing about it with her. And that’s also when I realized I can’t trust her. She says she doesn’t know how to talk to me (after I told her to stop asking me if I was cold/telling me I must be cold when she’s known for decades I don’t get cold), but it’s more that she won’t change how she talks to me. I have been very clear what my style of communication is and that I’m a grown-ass adult who doesn’t need to be treated like a three-year old. And she just makes excuses why she can’t change. Well, then, I’ll keep holding you at an arm’s length, then. She has said to me that she finds it sad that I can’t trust she has my best interest at heart. Well, this last visit has provided me with clear evidence that there’s good reason for me to not trust her.
I’m wrung out from the last three months. And, again, it’s not even the medical stuff. I’d gladly deal with that three times over than live with my parents again. The second I opened my eyes and saw them, my heart sank. Even hopped up on drugs, I knew it was going to be a rough time. The fact that on the second day I was awake, my father rambled about ‘taking me’ to Taiwan to….who the hell knows. In his fucked-up mind, he wanted to protect me, probably. But to me, just awoken from a week’s worth of unconsciousness and on a powerful cocktail of drugs, he was threatening to take me away from everything I knew. I kept repeating, “But this is my home” in my hoarse, rough, just extubated voice.
The one thing the last three months taught me is that my family is hopeless. The dysfunction runs too deep to ever have a hope of changing. I’m not being unduly pessimistic; I’m looking at the situation with clear eyes. My parents are 82 and 79. They have been like this all my life and have only gotten more entrenched as they aged. If my medical trauma wasn’t enough to change them, nothing will. That’s what I have to work on accepting.