After I got out of the hospital, I had to deal with my parents. This was by far the hardest part of the whole ordeal. My mother sent my brother and me this long email about Taiwanese culture and respecting your elders. She said that my brother and I needed to love and respect my father more. She actually wrote that down without wincing at how gross that was.
I’m not saynig that Taiwanese culture is not heavy on elder respect. It is. It’s a patrilineal society–at least it was back in the day. Countries change in time, much as people do. Taiwan was the first Asian countrty to make same-sex marriage legal, and though there have been legislation proposed to change this, it’s still currently legal–more or less. Since that’s not the purpose of this post, I’ll leave it at that for now.They also have a female president and have had her since 2016. In other words, they are more progressive in some ways than we are.
In addition, even though my mother likes to pull out Taiwanese culture like a trump card when she wants to get her way, she refuses to recognize that my brother and I were born and raised in Minnesota. Which, in case you can’t tell, is in the United States of America. We don’t give a shit about elders here! That’s not true, but I’m tempted to say that to my mother when she trots out Taiwanese culture.
The other thing is that not everything about every culture is good. Obviously. There are bad things in every culture so just saying something is part of a culture does not automatically make it worth venerating. I am not against showing respect towards elders, but…and I say this as an elder, it shouldn’t be mindless respect. I’m not saying you have to be disrespectful until they prove their worth, but so many things are covered under the guise of ‘respect your elders’. It’s adjacent to ‘but faaaaaaaaamily’.
My point, though, is that you can’t make someone respect or love someone else. It’s galling that my mother would even think that she had the right to order my brother and me to do that. It’s not surprising, mind, as she’s spent her whole adult life catering to my father and slavering over him. She has made being subjugated to him her entire identity and it’s only gotten worse with time. But it’s frustrating that as a therapist, she cannot understand that you can make anyone feel positive about someone.
She seems to think she can order my brother and me to have different feelings for our father. It smacks my gob that she can’t see that my father is getting the amount of love and respect he deserves. They both think that as parents, they should automatically get both because they are our parents. It’s circular reasoning at best. And, yes, this is probably a more Western way of thinking about things, but I don’t give fealty for no reason.
If my parents were not my parents, I would feel more pity for my mother. She has spent 55 years scraping and bowing to my father, who has only taken it as his just due and gets mad when her attention is off him for even a second. She has bent herself into an unrecognizable pretzel, and she doesn’t even realize it.
Making excuses for him is like second nature to her by now. There is an unspoken code in the family that he is not to be upset in any shape, matter, or size. My mother treats him like a baby/toddler who cannot self-soothe. To be clear, he has a low frustration tolerance (so do I, actually), but I do wonder if back in the first years of their marriage, what would have happened if my mother had put her foot down to my father’s nonsense.
It’s too late now. They’re both in their early eighties. I’m not saying they couldn’t change at their age, but they would have to want to–which I don’t see any evidence of. It’s frustrating because my mother asks for advice in how to deal with my father, but she won’t listen to the biggest piece of advice I could give her–one I’ve been saying since I was eleven. She should divorce him. Divorce him. DIVORCE HIM. I know that won’t happen now that his health (both physical and mental) is deteriorating, but I still can’t help think it.
Divorce him. Leave his ass on the curb. Get out and have a few years of life stress-free. But, as I told my brother, even if she did get free of my father, she’ll just find another lost cause to champion because being a martyr is the biggest part of her identity. She needs to feel needed. Even with all the bullshit my father has done to her, she’s cried about what is she going to do when he’s gone?
I’m numb at this point. She’s trying so hard to get me to give a fuck about my father, but it’s way too late at this point. She can cry about him all she wants and agonize over what she’s going to do once he’s gone. I have no heart for it. I’m numb at this point, because I can’t afford to allow myself to feel. My heart would be breaking continually, which surprises me.
You see, I thought I had reached a point where my parents could not hurt me any longer. That was before I ended up in the hospital. It was an uneasy detente, but a detente, nonetheless. We talked for a few minutes every month or so. My mom emailed me every now and again to do some editing for her, and that was it. Sure, she mentioned dying every phone call. She would talk about how little time she had left on earth (and my father as well).
It was annoying, but whatever. It was her attempt to elicit some kind of love from me, I tihnk. Some protestation or “I don’t want you to go” or some other fantasy that she has in her head. I’ve known for some time that her reality did not match mine. Or rather, she did not live in this world. She lived in a world of her own creation, and she quickly stuffed back anything that did not match that idyll vision she imagined for herself.
It all shattered when I ended up in the hospital. My parents made it clear that their codependent relationship was much more important than I was, and that my mother would clearly choose my father over me. She showed it over and over. She even said that she knew she should not have brought him with her because he would not be able to stand her helping me instead of focusing on him. She admitted she should have left him in Taiwan, but there was no way she could have done that. He could not live on his own, and he chased off anyone who came to help.
I had died, twice, remember. I was in a coma for a week. I was still in a coma when they flew here. So, she knowingly chose to bring him here even though she might have needed to take care of me if I woke up. To be fair, everyone thought I was going to die–for good, I mean. I wasn’t supposed to wake up, so that visit was supposed to include my funeral. Which my father would have to be at, unfortunately.
Family. It’s so hard. It’s the one tihng I don’t know how to deal with now that I’m back from the dead.