It’s Mother’s Day. I have had a fraught history with this date. First of all, it’s a manufactured holiday. The idea was noble. A woman did it in honor of her mother to celebrate all mothers did for their children. Which, fine. I have no issues with that*. But as with all holidays, it’s become bastardized and commercialized.
Not only that, but it’s become a thing to wish any female-presenting person of a certain age a happy mother’s day. Which means me at this point. Even if we were to get past the whole assuming gender part (because let’s face it. That’s not going to change any time soon), it’s bizarre to me to wish anyone who isn’t your actual mother a happy mother’s day. Why would you wish any older female-shaped person a happy mother’s day? And it seems to happen to female-shaped people more than male-shaped people on father’s day.
It’s like people telling me how smart Chinese people are. And industrious/hard-working. Putting aside the fact that I’m not Chinese, let me remind people that positive stereotypes are still stereotypes. Asian American kids kill themselves at a high rate in college because of the pressure to live up to the model minority stereotypes. I will say that a lot of this is in-group pressure because in East Asian cultures, there is a high value placed on education. And being as ‘good’ as possible. This is how the stereotypes started, and it’s only been perpetuated over the years.
Anyway! I’m at the age where I’ve gotten wished a happy mother’s day at the grocery store. Which is just bizarre to me. Another reason not to do this is because there are people who have had miscarriages, are infertile, or can’t have children for other reasons and deeply mourn the loss.
Of course, the people at the grocery store don’t really care about mothers. I wouldn’t expect them to. It’s probably a mandate from on high, and I’m not sure the purpose. I’ve read that this happens in church and to a much lesser extent, work.
I have always hated the day because my mother gets upset if I don’t send her a card. My brother sends her nothing. He is not a people-person, and he doesn’t get why things ilike this are important. And he’s a dude, so he’s allowed to get away with it. I, on the other hand, am not because I present as a woman. I am supposed to take care of my mother emotionally, and I’ve been expected to do this since I was eleven.
This was waaaaaay before I knew the term parentification, of course. My mother apologized for this when I was in my thirties, but she didn’t stop doing it. Now, she justifies it by saying the parent and child roles have been reversed. And she continues to dump her shit on me. She tries to justify it by saying it’s the way of the Taiwanese culture–that the parent becomes the child. She also tried to justify it by saying that it affected me as well because he was my father.
And, she’s not wrong. But she’s also not right. Yes, he’s my father. Yes, him having dementia is something that…no it doesn’t affect me, but in a normal family, it would be perfectly acceptable to tell me about my father’s health declining.
Here’s the problem, though. She’s been oversharing with me for my whole life about her marriage. I know that my father would stay out until midnight, claiming that he was working (even when he worked for the state), that he was not fucking the women from church, that he would not let her call him at work, and so much more.
That’s the problem with narcissistic people–any hint of a boundary makes them indignant. My mom never understood why I would want to keep anything personal and/or private. If something was on her mind, she had to say it out loud.
It took me way too long to realize that boundaries is not a bad word. I did not have to tell my mother everything, nor did I want to. In fact, I don’t want to tell her anything because she has no capacity to understand anything that isn’t aligned with her way of thinking. Which is worrying for a therapist, by the way.
I’m a slow learner. I thought a mother was supposed to love you as you were–not mercilessly try to pummel you into who SHE wants you to be. Me coming out as b–her asking me what was next, animals? Me telling her I was studying Taiji–she said it was me inviting the devil to dance on my spine (which, tbh, sounds pretty cool). Me telling her about my first (of four) tattoos–don’t tell your father! Me telling her I didn’t want to have kids (again and again and again)–it’s not up to me. It’s my duty as a woman whether I wanted to do it or not. Also, it was selfish of me to deprive HER of being a grandmother to my children. Because, you see, it was different than being a grandmother to my brother’s three children because something something something Taiwanese culture.
There was never once when I told her something that she was positive about what I said. I once sent her a short story I wrote, set in the government bulding in which we bath had worked. i made sure there was no sex in it and all she had to say was that I swore a lot in it. And I hadn’t even! If she wanted swearing, she should have read many of my other stories.
The one boyfriend she’s met, she hated. She wasn’t wrong in the long run, but it didn’t make me want to introduce my parents to any of my other partners. At least she was polite to him. My father would not even talk. She hates the fac t that I only wear black. She brought me brightly-colored clothing, most of which I would not wear. There was one pair of pants, bright yellow with colored splashes, wraparound pannts, I loved them and wore them out, but other than that, yeah, no.
If you asked her, I don’t think theer’s one thing she likes about me other than I listen to her complain. I know (because she’s told me) that she had desperately wanted a daughter so she could redo the (fraught) relationship she had with her own mother. Because, you see, her mother was a stern, rigid woman who looked down on women. Even though she was one. But she was an exception, you see. My mother felt as if she could never please her mother–that woman who was unforgiving in her idea of what a woman should be.
You see where I’m going with this, probably. My mother wanted a daughter so she could do better than her mother did with her. By doing the exact same thing to me that her mother did to her. My grandmother was a harsh, unloving woman who clearly did not like women. At all.
My mother is not harsh and she is not outwardly unloving, but she does not like women, either. At all. Or rather, she does not believe there is anything other than one way for a woman to be. Thin, pretty, and pleasing to men. Married with two children (three like my brother is too many), but also having a good career after graduating with honors from college. No tats, no sexuality other than straight, no swearing, no being better than men, no ideas more important than what to cook for dinner.
The funny part? My mother hates things that are considered traditionally feminine. She does not like to cook or sew, even though she did both as I grew up. She liked to play tennis and softball. She liked having her hair short–no fuss, no muss.
My grandmother was the first woman to graduate from a certain college in Japan. She was the first woman to be the equivalent of a senator of her prefecture in Taipei. And yet, women weren’t shit to her. She was that generation’s version of a cool girl. My mother is the same, except she actually has a good heart. She’s just deeply fucked up and never dealt with her own trauma.
One reason I didn’t have kids is because I did not want to continue the family dysfunction. I did not want to be yet another in a long list of female-presenting people to fuck up the next generation. Because I would have. Not in the same way as my grandmother or mother, but it would have been just as gendered in some way. Yes, I had to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It was the only way to be sure that the cycle ended with me.
*I do, but that is neither here nor there. I will probably talk about some of them later, but it’s not important for the point I am currently making.