In my last post, I rambled about my parents and love. Or rather, the lack of love my parents have for me. It’s been incremental as a realization. Well, at least on my mother’s isde. I’ve never had any illusions about my father, which in a weird way, made him easier to deal with. He was a sexist, self-abosorbed, incurious man who only cared about himself and the image others had of him. He took great pains to appear (in his own mind) as the perfect husband and father, but nobody was fooled.
The bulk of our socializing as a family was at church. A regressive, repressive, reactive Taiwanese fundie church that firmly believed women were nothing and should do the bidding of any man around them. It may not have been explicitly stated in those words, but that was the underpinning of every sermon, story, and interaction.
As a girl child, I did not matter. More to the point, I was wrong in every way. I was an exuberant child. I loved running around, climbing trees, and laughing at the top of my lungs. I got that (figuratively) beaten out of me by the time I was seven.
Then, I was deeply depressed, tried to keep myself to myself, read all the time so I could escape into worlds that were not this one, and I wanted to die. I thought I was worthless and did not deserve to live. And it was all because of the teaching s of my church and the malignant/harmful rigid gender roles that my parents believed in.
I don’t remember much of my childhood because I have acively blocked it out. I do remember the permeating sense of misery and self-loathing that I had throughout my childhood. And the feeling of neglect. My mother took care of my brother and me in the physical sense. She fed us, clothed us, and made sure we were not lacking for anything in tha sense. Also, she stopped my father from spanking my brother (which meant that my father renounced all parenting duties because of course he would react in that fashion) and she persuaded my father to buy my brother an Apple comuputer at the then-prohibitive cost of three-thousand dollars.
My brother was undiagnosed autistic and he took to the computer like a duck to water. It probably saved his life. He is a tech head and a very early adaptor. That was probably the best thing my mother had done for him. I don’t begrudge him that because he needed it, but I can’t help but wonder where that support was for me.
There wasn’t any because I was just a girl. Now, given that my mother was an Asian mother, my brother and I had to do a million activities. I did softball, ping-pong, dance, cello, tennis, volleyball, and I had to go to summer school every year for gifted kids. My brother learned six different instruments and also played ping-pong, softball, tennis, and volleyball.
I enjoyed most of those activities in and of themselves, but I did not want to do them at the level that my mother expected. Oh, I also took piano for a few years. I started writing when I was fairly young. It was my salvation, and it was just for me. I didn’t share it with my parents because instinctively, I knew that they would either scoff, tear it down, or stomp on it (figuratively).
When I was in my twenties, I broke and shared a short story with my mother. It was set in a place where we both had worked (her for decades and me for a few years). I thought maybe she could relate to it on that level. It had no sex in it, and I thought it would be safe to share with her.
The only response she had was, “There sure is a lot of stwearing in it.”
That was it. Nothing about the story itself or anything positive. Just a scolding note about the swearing in it. I was crushed. I shouldn’t have been, but I was.
This is my mother. She can only see things from her point of view and anything that diverges even a little bit (and my god, do I diverge a lot) causes her tremendous discomfort. Then, she has to do whatever she can to frantically dispel that feeling. Which means denying anything that did not fit in her world view.
Which included me. She wanted a mini-me of herself, but not really. She wanted the perfect doll of a daughter who adhered to rigid proscribed gender roles to which she herself did not adhere. This is the part that kills me. SHe had a contentious relationship with her own mother who was very strident about gender roles while breaking them all for herself.
My grandmother was a bulldozer of a woman who barked out how great the men in the family were, which was not true. Of her eight children (four girls and four boys), two of the boys did not do much with their lives and died young. One was a doctor, but he also demanded everything for himself as the oldest boy. The other one…I don’t know what he does exactly. All four women had good jobs while being wives and mothers. And very involved in their churches.
Yet, my grandmother’s favorite daughter was the pretty one–the one who performed exemplary femininity the best. And I know that cut my mother very deep. She has told me that she wanted to have a daughter in a large part to have the relationship she could not have with her mother.
How ironic, then, that she has become her mother. Not in demeanor, maybe, but in spirit. She hates everything about me or pretends they’re not true because they make her uncomfortable.
Example. I told her I was bi when I was in my early twenties. It did not go well, to say the least. I dropped it because she was very unhappy and derisive about it. Several years later, I mentioned something about being bi, and she said in a very uncomfortable tone, “Oh, you still think you’re bi?”
That was the last time I brought it up. The way she phrased it told me all I needed to know. I should not have told her. I should have just kept it to myself as I do everything else these days. I still haven’t told her about my personal tragedy because I can’t deal with her making it about herself. Or, worse yet, my father.And then I’ll get furious and say something I will regret.
I’m done for now. More tomorrow.