I am back to talk more about my family. Here is yesterday’s post about my father’s problems with his memory. I have saved my mother for last because as usual, it’s the most complicated and entangled relationship. My brother and I get along great, and I don’t worry about annoying/hurting/bothering him because he’ll never remember it if I am. My father is my father, and it was pretty clear from when I was a kid that he was self-absorbed narcissist who would never care about anyone but himself. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he didn’t even love himself. That’s why he kept grasping for anything to fill the empty hole in his soul. Deep gaping maw.
Because he was so badly broken, it was easy to say, “This is a him problem, not a me problem.” It was different with my mother. Why? Because she can act like an actual human being. A deeply flawed one, yes, but one with ties to this actual world. Yes, that’s a dig on my father, and not even a subtle one.
This is where societal norms come in. I am from two cultures that venerate parents to an unhealthy degree, albeit in very different ways. In America, we give such lip service to family and how pro-family we are. We are not, which is probably not a shocker to anyone, but it’s a great sound bite. Mothers are special! Mothers love their children without restraint and will do anything for them!
On the other hand, Taiwanese culture is (or was, at least) about venerating your elders to a ridiculous degree (yes, I’m saying that with an American bias). You call your relatives different names based on their status in the family. What I mean is big brother has a different title than younger brother, for example. There is a very complicated heiarchy as to who is venerated the ost. Grandparents, then father, then mother, then sons…wait. Sons may go before mother. Girls are really treated like shit. Or at least they were. My knowledge is decades old because my parents have not evolved at all since the sixties.
Both of these fucked with my head because the underlying message was that there was no bad parents. Again, for different reasons. In America, it aligned with the toxic positivity that is so prevalent in this country. Parents are the best! Parents are all good and only want good for their children! (But, again, we will not do anything to support parents. Shhhhhh!)
In Taiwan, it was more that kids were a nuisance in a way. Or that they were…it’s hard to explain. My father treated us like a nonentity and he was annoyed whenever we spoke. I felt like in his mind, we were props in his movie. We were supposed to do what he wanted, and what’s more, we were supposed to do it without being asked. That’s another thing. Both the cultures I belong to (Minnesotan and Taiwanese) are guess cultures, which are tricky to navigate. They are valid cultures, but everyone has to be on the same page.
It’s difficult to explain to people who are askers the benefits of a guess culture because it’s such an anathema to askers. I mean, a blunt culture is uncomfortable for guessers, too, but that doesn’t seem to be as valid. It’s not surprising, but depressing how consistently the dominant culture minimizes and brushes past minority cultures.
Anyway! My mother. I assumed she was a typical mother because I had no other reference. I rarely went to friends’ houses (I didn’t really have them as a kid. Friends, I mean), and the other mothers I knew were Taiwanese–and they acted much like my mother. Strict, overbearing, and not allowing other people to get a word in edgewise.
My mother had many issues as a twenty-something-year-old woman. That is not a diss because we all did at that age. I mean, hell, I do at this age. Her issues, though, deeply impacted me. That’s because many of them are gender-related, and as an AFAB, that means that she had many expectations of me. I did not meet any of them, and I was a massive disappointment to her.
That’s not what this post is about, though. It’s about how she lies/forgets. Not on purpose, but relentlessly. Anything that puts her in a bad light, she immediate deep sixes it. I first realized it in my twenties. When I graduated from college, I was magma cum laude. I was pretty damn proud of that. My mother commented that I would have graduated summa if I hadn’t gotten a B in my intro psych class (boring story). That crushed me because as I said, I was pretty proud of graduating magna.
Several years later, I brought it up to my mother, and she denied she had said that. She sounded completely sincere, which irritated me. Not because I thought she was lying, but because it had bothered me for many years (though not constantly). When I pressed her on it, she was adamant that she did not say it. Then she added, “If I did, I meant it to be reassuring.”
I thought that was bullshit, but the more I thought about it, the more it actually made sense. My mother is highly anxious and she is always trying to quell discontentment in part because my father is so critical. She sees unhappiness where it doesn’t exist (in fact, that’s her main default) so she goes overboard in trying to reassure. Did I believe she didn’t remember it? Not at the time. I thought she was denying it out of embarrassment. However, over the years, it became more and more obvious that she wiped her memory of anything that put her in a bad light or that she did not want to remember.
The last time my parents were here, there was a really big example of it. I don’t want to get into it right now, but I will tomorrow.