When I was a kid, I was taught that there was nothing about the family that you could say to anyone not in the family. I’m not talking about big things like marital difficulties (though, that, of course, was also verboten), but about the little things. The story I tell over and over goes like this. My parents went to play tennis with their friends all the time. One time, they were out with a friend playing tennis. Another friend called and asked for my father. I said he was out playing tennis.
It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. When my parents came home, my father flipped his shit at me. He told me that I shouldn’t have said that to the other friend, which confused the hell out of me. I asked why because I truly didn’t undrestand. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but what was the big deal about going to play tennis with some friends. My father said that the other friend would feel left out, which didn’t make sense to me, either.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized the issue. My father was playing with his current special ladyfriend (and her husband. And my mather). My father has had a mistress since–well, probably since dating my mother. He certainly has had one since I was a little kid. My mother has been crying about it for fifty years. He always had one in the wings as well–a backup in case he got bored with the current one. Which he often did.
I wouldn’t have thought the other friend was his type because he liked really feminine women–but, on the other hand, he married my mother who was not a typically feminine woman. The other friend was more like my mother than my father’s usual type. At any rate, at some point, she cut herself off from the Taiwanese community, and I would not be surprised if my father was part of the reason why.
Anyway, he was mad that I had told his potential mistress that he was with his current mistress. He was by nature a very sly person. He kept things close to the vest and only doled out information as needed. As he deemed it to be so, I mean, not the more universal meaning of the word. It was impenetrable until you realize that it just meant what put him in the best light. That’s it.
My point is that I was taught that you don’t tell anyone anything. Period. No matter how seemingly innocuous it seemed, it was an outrage to say anything to anyone about anything. It was like his penny-pinching ways. He would scrutinize every penny spent (one time he was here recently, he complained about kiwis being two for a dollar), but then he’d spend a hundred bucks on a water pick he never used. It sat unopened on a shelf for years. It wasn’t even that it was a hundred bucks (which was a lot of money, but not excessive), but that he bought it on impulse and never used it.
In the same way, he hoarded information about himself, and in general was not happy with any of it being told to anyone unless he approved it first.
On the flip side, my mother told everyone everything. Not when it came to my father, maybe, but everything else was fair game. And even with my father, she could never keep her own dicta. For her fiftieth anniversary, she really wanted to go on a cruise. She told my brother to pay for it and tell my father that he had paid for it, while she would send him (my brother) the money. I found out later from my brother that my mother told my father that she had paid for it at some point.
That’s her to the core. She can’t keep a secret for the life of her. When I had my medical crisis, she was telling everyone and their sister about it. The Uber driver. The cleaner. Probably the mailman if she talked to him. She got mad at me when I said maybe she could dial it back.
“It’s my life, too!” She said heatedly. Well, yes. But it’s primarily my life. And I think I should get to decide who gets to know the details of what happened to me (outside of the medical system, of course).
I have to say that I have issues with my Taiji teacher because of this. She is very much an open book, which is fine for her. But she also has no filter, which is not. I read somewhere that’s it’s partly ask versus guess culture, but I don’t think that’s all it is. Because my mother is very much from guess culture, but she has no boundaries. My Taiji teacher is very much of ask culture herself (though she is from a guess culture), but she also has issues with boundaries. What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s an ask versus guess culture issue. It’s a boundary issue. It’s a private versus personal issue. It’s about where each individual feels comfortable with what is being shared about them. And with what they share with others.
I’ve learned that I’m very much on the private side of the scale. Not to the extent of my father, but things that are about me, well it should be my decision to share them or not. Like my medical crisis. I get why my mother would tell all her friends, her church, and the professional groups (psychology) to which she belongs. I get why my Taiji teacher would tell my classmates. But…it still bothers me a bit. In the latter case, not so much that she told my current classmates, but that she told my past classmates, too. Ones I haven’t talked to in a decade beacuse they’re no longer in class. I know she still sees one of them personally, but I’m not sure about the other person.
What I don’t like, though, is that she brought it up spontaneously in class along with my birthday. I don’t celebrate my birthday, and I never mention it. I don’t bring it up, and I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t hate it as I once did, but I don’t want people to make a fuss about it. When Facebook used to require you had your birthday on it and that it had to be public, I lied. I put a random date in January in my profile and called it a day. It was always hilarious when dozens of people would wish me a happy birthday on a random day in January. I would always be surprised until I remembered why.
Part of the problem is that we’re friends as well as being teacher/student, but I’m not comfortable with her revealing things about me from my personal life in class. Especially when I’m right there. I had to bring it up to her, and it hasn’t happened since, but we’ll see.
Earlier, I mentioned that I did not like when my mother talked about what happened to me willy and indeed nilly. To my Taiji teacher, I mean. She got huffy about it, and that’s when I realized that she was not going to be open to changing. So, since I could not change her, the only thing I could do was change myself. Also, I want to be clear that there have been other times when she’d just blurt things out in class that I had told her in private. I believe she has no malice in what she’s doing. I just know that if I want to keep something private, then I have to be very explicit with her–or just keep it to myself.