One of my biggest assets–and flaws–is that I am a chameleon when I talk to people. I have exemplary people skills, but it’s more a burden than a blessing. I’ve written before that I’m excellent at reading people. I rarely tell them about themselves, but it’s knowledge I silently file away.
Simultaneously, I was raised to believe that as a girl, my entire worth was what I could do for others. Physically, emotionally, and mentally. I have a narcissistic father who relates everything and everyone to himself. I remember a time when we were having an argument about something, don’t remember what, when I was a teenager. We were yelling at each other and I ran to my room, slamming the door behind me. It burst open a few seconds later, my father livid. He started screaming at me about how dare I yell at him and that I was so disrespectful of him. He added that it was his house and I was not allowed to slam the doors in it.
Granted, I did not behave well during this argument. I can admit to that. But him responding by yelling even louder at me and slamming the door open himself, well, that’s just hypocritical. But it also demonstrated clearly how he was very much ‘do as I say and not as I do’.
He was the only one allowed to have emotions in the family, especially negative ones. The rest of us were expected to tiptoe around him, making sure not to upset him. One of the problems with that is that it’s nearly impossible to gauge what will upset him and what won’t. He can take offense at just about anything–I get it from him.
He’s big on saving face, which is a part of his culture, but to an extreme that isn’t seen in his compatriots. For example, one time he and my mother went out to play tennis with some friends. Another (female) friend (trust me, this is important) called and asked where he was. I told her that he was out playing tennis.
I mentioned this to my father when my parents returned, and he grew furious with me. He said I shouldn’t have told her where he’d gone because she would be upset and something about saving face. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was ridiculous. Years later, I realized that the reason he didn’t want me to tell her was because he was out with his current lady of the moment and the one calling was either a past one or a future one, and he did not want her to know who he was with.
Side Note: I remember watching my father play tennis with his current lady-of-the-moment and it was so obvious that she was different from his other friends. It was nothing blatant on his part, but just the way she played up to him and he took all her attention as what was due to him. This was when I was ten or eleven, but I knew about his special ladyfriends by the time I was eight or nine. Everyone did.
My mom told me when I was in my twenties that someone from our church sent me and my brother anonymous letters when we were kids, telling us that our father was a bad man who broke up families and they thought we should know. My mother would intercept them and destroy them, of course. I’m not sure how she know it was someone from our church–maybe they mentioned that he was seemingly a man of God by going to church, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of his jilted ladyfriends.
It might have been an angry husband, but I don’t think so. This kind of letter feels more feminine than masculine to me, but I fully admit that’s just bias on my part. I did a quick Google, but could not find anything to support (or discredit) my argument.
My mom has catered to my father all their marriage. She does everything she can to make sure he never feels one second of discomfort. She roped me into it when I was eleven, making me her confidante. She would sob for hours about how miserable she was and how bad her marriage was, but then she would freak out if I said she divorce him. I understand that’s a drastic solution, but she shot down any other suggestion I had as well.
She made it my problem, and she continues to do so. When she was here during my medical trauma, it got worse. Since we were pretty much in each other’s way 24/7, all our worst traits flared up. But it was unforgivable because I was the one who died. Twice. I was the one who was unconscious for a week. I was the one who had to be on a breathing machine/tube for two weeks total. I was the one who was supposed to die again and not return.
I’ll put it bluntly. There is nothing that either of my parents could have gone through during that time short of death itself that would be worse than what I experienced. The fact that my father dared to say to ME that I could not understand what HE went through when I was unconscious says it all. I actually said to him, “What you went through? I was the one who died!” Which he brushed aside. It was about his pain, you see. He did throw my mom in the end there, probably to secure his position that what he went through was the most important thing.
That was one of the moments when I realized just how dysfunctional our family was. Me dying was about his pain, not mine. The other moment was two days after I returned home, two things happened. One, my mother pushed me into showing him a Taiji back stretch that I do every day and that has helped me totally get rid of my back pain. When I tried to protest, she was adamant. So, two days after I got out of the hospital, I was dizzy and exhausted, trying to show my father this back stretch.
The second thing was that he wanted me to Google something for him. One of the side effects from what happened to me was that I could not read any fonts on the computer. At all. So I could not Google something for him. He said, “Just one article” like that was the problem. I literally could not read anything online, but he did not want to hear that. As he was going back to the dining room, his resentment radiating from his body, he ‘accidentally’ knocked a bottle of my meds off the dining room table and didn’t pick them up.
That was when it was crystal clear to me me as a person actually meant nothing to my parents. They care about this nebulous person called their daughter, but not about the actual person named Minna. And my father is always first. I learned this when I was six or seven, and it’s only gotten worse in time. My father has dementia which he strenuously denies, which does not help anything. And things got really bad while he and my mom were here.
This is my long-winded way of pointing out that I have spent all my life bending myself to the will of others. I was taught that I had to anticipate every stray feeling my father had and that I had to emotionally support my mother through countless hours of depression, anxiety, and anger about her marriage.
There was a time in my twenties and thirties when I felt as if I didn’t have a core. I reflected the people around me, and I had to fake emotions because it wasn’t safe to feel them. The process went like this. Someone would tell me something big, like they were having a baby. I would have to take several seconds to think, “OK. They are having a baby. That’s usually a good thing. How do they appear? They are smiling. They are happy.” Then I would say, “Oh, wow! That’s so great. A baby! Congratulations!” and hold my breath that I had made the right calculations. That congratulations, by the way, would be real, but I wouldn’t actually feel it. I’d be intellectually happy for the person, but I couldn’t connect to the feeling.
It’s the same with a negative feeling. If someone told me, say, that their grandmother had died, I’d have to think. “Grandmother died. That’s usually a bad thing. Are they sad? They are frowning. They have tears. They are sad.” Then, I would voice my sympathy and support without really feeling anything. Again, I was unhappy that they were unhappy, but I had my feelings stuffed waaaaay down so I couldn’t actually *feel* it.
What changed that? Well, Taiji. But This is running long, so I’ll end it here for now.