I’m the keeper of bad familial memories, which is not a pleasant role. My brother and mother both tend to forget the bad times. My brother said someone was asking him about his bad realtor experiences and he couldn’t name any. My mom will flat-out deny the negative things she’s said to me in the past. My brother and I were recently talking about our family and he said he hadn’t remembered most of the things I commented about (from our childhood) until I brought them up. So in his case, it’s self-defense and a way of protecting himself from the unpleasantness. It’s also self-protection for my mother, but in a different way. For my brother, it’s protection from bad things around him. In my mother’s case, there’s some of that, but it’s also a way for her to shield herself from the bad things about HER. none of us like to think badly about ourselves, but she takes it to an extreme–in part because my father is so critical of her.
The one example I always give is when I graduated from college. I graduated magna cum laude, for which I was pretty proud. My mom said after the ceremony that if I hadn’t gotten a B in Intro Psych, I might have graduated summa (not true). I was pretty crushed when she said it because I had worked semi-hard to get the magna. Years later, when I confronted her about it, she denied saying it. Then she added, “If I did say it, I must have meant it as a way for you not to feel bad about not getting summa.” Which, again, I didn’t! I didn’t feel bad until she said what she said. The thing is, though, I believe her when she says she doesn’t remember saying it. Or rather, I believe that she’s vested in not remembering things she’s said or done that make her look bad.
It’s not gaslighting because she truly doesn’t remember it–just as my brother truly doesn’t remember the negative things that happen to him. It’s a defense mechanism and now that I understand what’s happening, I don’t have to think I’m crazy because I remember things my brother and mother don’t.
It makes family dysfunction even harder to deal with, though, when I’m the only one who remembers what happened. Before my medical trauma, I was low-contact with my parents. We talked on the phone maybe once a month and emailed sporadically. That was really about all I could deal with. When I woke up in the hospital and saw my mother, my heart sank. Even all drugged up, I knew it was going to be a problem being near them 24/7.
And, boy, was it. It was terrible and I’m still scarred from it. I told my brother that the medical scare didn’t really affect me that much (which was being a bit facile), but being around my parents did. He said I didn’t complain at all about being in the hospital or any of the medical stuff–my only complaints were about our parents. In the last month of their visit, I had a running count of all the times they annoyed me. I was donating a dollar a time to Planned Parenthood and sent a nice amount after my parents left. I was going to make it double every time my father said something sexist, but I’m not made of money.
I was basically gritting my teeth and getting through it as best as I could. Before I ended up in the hospital, I had been slowly cutting out meat. I had it down to once a day and was trying to cut it out completely for ethical reasons. That went to hell in a hand basket when my parents were here because they’re big believers in eating lots of meat. They think you can only get protein from meat and I didn’t have the energy to fight it. I’m back to eating meat once a day. It’s going from that to no times a day that I’m stumbling over.
I’ve never liked my father nor expected any kind of relationship with him. It’s my mother that is more complicated. She thinks we’re close and lamented when my last therapist encouraged me to pull back. My mother tried to say it was cultural difference, but it wasn’t. She tried to use that as an excuse again in scolding my brother and me for not being loving/respectful enough towards our father.
First of all, you can’t demand someone love/respect someone more than they do. I mean, you can, obviously, but it’s not something that works in brute-forcing. In fact, as a psychologist, she should know that the exact opposite effect is likely to occur. The more you try to make Person A love Person B, the more likely Person A is to resent/hate Person B.
Anyway. When I woke up in the hospital, the second day I was awake, my father gave this big speech about how he was sorry he hadn’t been there when my brother and I were kids so now he wanted to take me to Taiwan so we could be a family. Now, you have to understand that I was born and raised in Minnesota. I have lived here my whole life except for one year when I lived in the Bay Area. This is my home. My father dragging me to Taiwan is my worst nightmare. I was hopped up on drugs with a breathing tube still in my nose. I kept saying hoarsely that this was my home. I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t shut him up and that was when I realized how enmeshed they were. I mean, I always knew he came first in her life, but that really underscored how far back I was on her list. She knew he was deeply upsetting me and she didn’t say a damn thing.
The second day I was home, she urged me to show him the back exercise I had learned in Taiji that got rid of my back problems. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I went from almost crippling back pain to none at all in a year. It took a few months before I felt better and a full year before the pain was gone at all. It’s not a hard exercise, but it’s still exercise. I tried to protest, but she pushed me on it. That was when I realized that she would always choose him over me. I mean, I knew it on some level, but nothing made it clearer than me being fresh out of the hospital, drugged to the gills, exhausted, and bewildered, and her pushing me to do something that would be explicitly bad for me. And it wasn’t even something that would instantly make him feel better. It wouldn’t have mattered that much if I waited a few weeks to show him.
I thought to myself, “She would rather I die if it meant he would have a better life.” And later on, there was a huge fight she had with my father that she dragged me into. I defended her, shouting at him in the meantime. Later, she admonished me for also yelling at him (when I said he had been yelling at me). I looked at her in amazement and said, “I was defending YOU.” She didn’t remember that at all. And she blamed me for the discomfort because I refused to apologize to him (she came to me and asked me to apologize to him to keep the peace). Then she sent me and my brother an email ranting about respecting and loving him more and the Taiwanese way.
I lost a huge amount of respect for her during this last visit. She showed her true colors and how deep the dysfunction runs. I can’t trust her to have my best interests at heart–not when they countermand anything my father wants. That’s sad, yes, but it’s also instructive. I won’t forget what I learned any time soon.