I was reading random Ask A Manager posts as is my wont. One was from a woman whose mother was telling her that the reason she could not get hired is because she (the writer) was fat. The writer was also multiracial (black and white) and gay. So, of course, I instantly felt a kinship. People were rightly indignant on her behalf, and it got me thinking about my relationship with my mother (again). I had read the post before and usually ignored it when it came up again (when I hit the random post button) because it really touched a nerve. For whatever reason, I read it this time, and I am musing about my relationship with my mother.
That’s not unusual–me thinking about my relationship with my mother, I mean. It’s been tumultuous (at best) for my entire life. She called me a few hours ago atnd is her wont, dumped all her big feelings on me. She does this every time we talk. In fact, that’s the reason she calls me. I know it; she knows it; and it’s worse when she tries to pretend it’s not true.
The reason I was thinking about this post was because of one particular comment. This comment about how the commenter’s mother would have said something similar, but it would have come from a place of love. The commenter mentioned how she would deal with it, then acknowledged it would be harder if someone’s mom was deeply insecure or did not have the OP’s best interest at heart (paraphrased).
She could not bring herself to write down the obvious (or didn’t even think of it): maybe the mother does not love the writer. Now, in that particular case, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. However, there are plenty of mothers who do not love their children. And fathers. I am ‘lucky’ in that I have both a father and mother who do not love me as a person.
In ome ways, it’s easier to deal with my father. He has always been a deeply self-centered person who did not give two figs about anyone else. He was dependent upon my mother to make his life run smoothly (and his secretary when he was the president of an ecoonomic research center), but he did not love her as a person. In fact, his only use for people is what they can do for him.
Right now, deep in his dementia, he is fixated with me going to visit them. It’s not because he misses me as a person, though, but because as an insatiable extrovert, he’s desperately lonely. And one thing a child should be doing for him is paying him undivided attention. He has no inteerst in me as a person; he never has. He could not name five facts about me–even before he got dementia.
I much prefer that to the hot messiness that is my relationship with my mother. For several decades, I didn’t realize that she was just as self-absorbed and unable to love me as my father was because it manifested in her much diffirently than it did in my father. And beacuse of the persistent myth in both American and Taiwanese culture that mothers love their children and always put them first. Well, the latter is more an American myth than a Taiwanese one.
For the first thirty years of my life, I believed it without even thinking about it. Of course my mother loved me and wanted what’s best for me. She’s my mother! Of course she loved me, wanted what was best for me, and would always put me (and my brother) first. It didn’t help that these were the words she spoke to me.
Her actions, however, did not match her words. The last time she was here, she insisted that my brother and I were first in her heart. She would not let it go, and Ifinally said, “You know that’s not true.” I was a bit heated, but I kept it under control. She looked like she wanted to argue, but she finally said, “Well, it’s true in my heart.”
Which, ok. I can’t argue what is first in her heart, but her actions belie that. She has also said that she puts God first, but that isn’t true, either. It’s my father, plain and simple. He’s her god, and he has been for the last fifty years.
It’s the same when she kept saying she knew she should not dump emotionally on me and continued to do it. After the third or fourth time, I told her to stop saying. “You’re going to do it, anyway.” I said. She half-grimaced/half-smiled ashamedly, but she did not deny it.
I have told her over and over again that she needed therapy (she knew it. She’s a psychologist, for fuck’s sake!), and she came up with excuse after excuse as to why she could not do it. I gave up after a while, just like I gave up telling her to divorce my father when I was a pre-teen. Yes, she started dumping on me when I was ten or eleven. I was her emotional support person, and it was such a burden on me. I didn’t know the word ‘parentification’ until decades later, but that was what she was doing.
And it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I truly got that my mother did not love me. More to the point, she never really wanted to be a mother. She did it because that was what she was supposed to do, but she did not actually want to be a mother. At least she comes by that honestly. My grandmother (her mother) was a bad mother, too, and clearly did not love her children or her grandchildren (at least not my brother and me).
My mother thought that being a mother would fill the hole in her. She said that staying home with my brother and me when we were babies were the best times of her life. Notice, before we became actual people. And she hated everything about me. Oh, she never said she did, but she would get a sour face any time I brought up anything important to me. Tats, bisexuality, leaving Christianity, starting Taiji. She was not happy about any of them, and that’s putting it mildly.
I’m a slow learner. I continued to tell her things until I truly realized that she would never be happy with anything I did. Because even though she would say she purportedly wanted me to be traditionally feminine (which, by the way, is darkly humorous because she is so not that way, either), I have a hunch that even if I had done everything she claimed she wanted me to be and do, she would have found something else to complain about.
Why? Because my brother did all the trad stuff, and she didn’t like a lot of that, either. It’s beacuse she has an ideal in her mind about what family should be, and nothing can live up to it. The brokenness inside of her cannot be patched by anything I or my brother does. It’s like when I was anorexic. I thought that if I reached that magical weight, everything would be perfect. Needless to say, that was not true in any way, shape or form, but I clung to that myth for a long time.
I’m done for now. I will probably write more about it tomorrow.