I’m obsessed with the idea of boundaries because my parents don’t have any. None. Nada. Zip. They don’t believe their children should have individual personalities. We are reflections of them and therefore must replicate their ideology identically. My brother is the favored child because he is a boy and the oldest. he also followed more of what my parents espouse, but he has come afoul across their beliefs more than once. The way they hold up their ideals makes it impossible to meet them. For example. my mom pushed my brother to have kids for years. Him and his wife. They didn’t have children until 6 years into marriage, which was unheard of in Taiwanese culture. They had three kids with a big gap between one and two, and during that time, my mom pushed me to have kids of my own.
At one point, she was talking to my brother on the phone about being upset that I wasn’t having children. Yes, she did it where I could hear her, probably unconsciously on purpose. She was saying there was a bond between mother and daughter when the daughter had a child. And, there was a saying in Taiwanese about the difference between a son having a child and a daughter having a child, and she was so sad that she wouldn’t get to have that. My brother joked that he could have more children, to which my mother quickly said that he had done enough.
See? You can’t win with her. She was upset that I didn’t have children and upset that my brother had too many.
Side note: my mother has a disconnect between what she thinks she wants and what she actually wants. She has said repeatedly that she always wanted children and being a mother was the most important thing to her from since she was young. She extended that to having grandchildren. It was so important to her, she had to nag me about it for fifteen years (and my brother for the first six of his marriage).
Here’s the rub. She never liked me as a person. She certainly did not like me as a child. I was fat, gawky, awkward, deeply depressed, and a bookworm. She made dresses for me to wear, which I hated. I liked to run around and climb trees, but that was looked down upon by her and the other women in our (Taiwanese) church. I was too boyish, which was not acceptable. Except for playing sports. For some reason, that was fine for women/girls to do, but only in strictly circumscribed circumstances. But I wasn’t supposed to run around, laughing, shouting, and climbing trees. I was supposed to be quiet, sit with my legs shut, and be small. Both physically and mentally.
I spent most of my childhood, miserable for so many reasons. I was fat. Well, I wasn’t really, but my mom was convinced I was. I was chubby. I was solid. I was thicc, yes. But when I look at pictures of me as a kid, I wasn’t grotesquely fat as my mother constantly made me feel I was. She put me on my first diet when I was seven and told me that I would be so pretty if only I lost weight. When I was seven.
I won’t get into that more because I’ve written about it ad nauseam, and it’s only the background to this post. Which is about nonexistent boundaries.
My mom wanted to be a grandmother so much, she had to make her pain my pain. And my brother’s. But that spiel about the bond of a mother and daughter when the daughter has children? It’s all bunkum. She was here when she had her kids whereas my grandmother was in Taiwan. My grandmother, who only cared about boy children. My grandmother who never once talked to me or even looked at me the few times we were in the same room. I didn’t exist in her world, but more to the point, it wasn’t as if my mother had her mother around when she (my mother) had children.
In other words, she was wishing for something she never had. She had no idea what happened with a mother and daughter when the daughter had a child because her mother has been absent from her life for most of her life. In fact, I think a lot of what she wanted to do with me was based on that unresolved wishful thinking.
She and my father should not have had kids. They had them for the wrong reasons, and they don’t really see my brother and me as individuals. My mother has made it clear that she feels I have rejected her way of life, and she would not be understand how she is right and she is wrong simultaneously. Yes, I don’t want anything she wants from life, but it’s not out of spite. But in her mind, it can’t be anything but because how could I not want what she wants?
This leads to the question of boundaries. I’m not good at them. I’ve gotten better over the last decade with the help of Taiji. By the way, yes, Taiji in my answer to everything. But with my family, it’s really difficult to set healthy boundaries–so I make them bigger than they need to strictly be. In other words, I interact with my parents as little as possible. Because they continue to make me feel unseen and unwanted.
You would think after my medical trauma, that would have been the perfect time to mend fracture family relations. It would have been if they were capable of or willing to change. Sadly, this was not the case. They doubled down on the sickness, making things even worse than they used to be. It all came to a head one day in which my father was shouting at my mother. She ran into the living room where I was while he was still yelling at her about trying to enslave him or some such bullshit. I jumped in and told him to stop yelling at her. Yes, I know I shouldn’t have stepped in, but it was impossible to ignore when she brought it to me. There was a lot of yelling and screaming. A LOT. My father said some unbelievably cruel things and my mother cried a lot.
Later that day, my brother came over. We were having dinner and my father said he wanted to explain what happened. I cut him off and said it was not needed (nor wanted, really). He insisted, and his version was a complete fabrication. He talked about driving and being concerned about my mother’s driving, but that wasn’t what we were arguing about. I think he sincerely believed his version, but that didn’t make it right. At some point, I cut him off because I could not stand hearing his utter bullshit. Later, my mother came and asked if I’d apologize to him because apparently I hurt his feelings by cutting him off. I refused because I said I wasn’t the one who needed to apologize.
A day or two later, she sent my brother and me this long email about how we needed to respect and love my father more. It was full of admonishments without any acknowledgement of his flaws. When I talked about it with my mom, she was full of excuses for him. But his pathology, though! She actually said it was his pathology, that I was the ‘normal’ one, that you’re supposed to respect your elders in Taiwanese culture, and a whole slew of other bullshit. When I said he didn’t apologize for yelling at me, she pointed out I yelled at him, too. When I reminded her it was because he was yelling at her, she said, “Oh, I had forgotten that.”
That was the moment that I knew it was hopeless and that she would never change. More to the point, she didn’t see any reason to change or that she was able to do it. That was when she said the unspoken out loud–she would always put my father first. She was the one who ran into the living room where I was when he was yelling at her. I tried to intervene (stupid), and she got mad at ME for yelling at him? For not allowing him to gaslight me?
Fuck. That. Noise.
Fuck that noise twice.
So when she sent me an email about feeling us drift apart (about a month after they returned back to Taiwan)? Gee, I wonder why. When she said she wanted to change that, I had nothing to say. I’m done talking about it. I’ve talked until I was blue in the face about it over the years. There’s nothing I can say that will make a difference if she hasn’t understood it by now.
I’m done. I’m superficially as pleasant as I can be, but that’s it. That’s all I can do.