Life is not always a box of chocolates–sometimes, it’s rotten milk. Ok. That’s not a good analogy, but hopefully, my meaning is clear. This has been a bad few weeks I listed why in my last post, and I’m just not feeling it at the moment. It’s nothing big, but a series of small, irritating, mostly self-inflicted wounds.
The thing is this. In the first bonus year of my life, I pretty much decided I was just going to enjoy it. Despite my mother pressuring me less than a month out of the hospital as to what I was going to do. Even when I told her I was taking six months just to regroup, she was pushing it. Later, I realized it was because my father was bugging her about it, and she always do whatever my father wants–eventually.
This is the mainstay of their marriage, which has been for fifty-five years. He has her so beaten down at this point, she literally cannot consider doing something that might upset him. Hm. Let me rephrase this. In the big things, she will not go against him. She will jab at him, however, in small ways that are equal parts infuriating and understandable. Such as, she will blab about his health issues to anyone who will listen. She did the same when I was going through my own medical crisis. She has no filter on her mouth when it comes to things like this.
Other things she does that are even less savory. She was complaining to me (because she is all about complaining) that during a wave of COVID cases–let me quickly explain. for the first year of the pandemic, Taiwan was on top of it. They were so strict, they had no cases for nine months. Then, as was human nature, they relaxed a bit and because they are a small, enclosed island that were vulnerable to massive spread.
In the second year, they had a case of a pilot who brought in COVID and went partying all night. This guy single-handedly caused COVID to rampage through the country. In an unbelievably short amount of time, they were up to 100,000 cases a day. The biggest difference is that most people are at least double-vaxxed so their death rate is miniscule in comparison to ours.
Anyway, at one point, my father was sick with a fever. My mother ‘joked’ with him that maybe it was COVID and hopefully, he wouldn’t die from it. Now, you have to understand that my father is a raging hypochondriac. He has been his whole life. Any little cough, and he was off to the doctor. Ironically, when he actually had something serious going on, he dragged his feet into going.
When my mom relayed this little story to me, she said it with a rueful chuckle, saying she had ‘accidentally’ made a mistake. I put accidentally in quotes beacuse that wasn’t an accident–it was payback. It was her little way of getting a dig in at him because she knew that it wasn’t really a joke, not for someone who was deathly afraid of dying. Which my father was. In addition, joking about someone dying is a sticky situation, anyway. I do it about me dying, but that’s because it’s my own death that I’m joking about. There are very few people who can joke about it as well–which is all up to me. My brother can joke about it. He’s allowed and does. K and Ian can as well, but neither of them really do. My Taiji teacher is on the list, and we have joked about it.
The tthing that got to me is that my mother actually said she had made a little joke that didn’t go over well. If it was a joke, then she really didn’t understand human nature–which is dangerous as she’s a psychologist. If she’s truly doesn’t get why it’s not funny, then it’s best if she does not make that kind of joke. But, I think that on some level, this is her way of getting some of her own back for all the abuse she’s taken at his hands.
If that’s the case, I don’t blame her. Honestly. She’s put up with a lot. But the ugly side of abuse is that the abused oftenitmes becomes an abuser themselves or at least an enabler. That is what my mother has done with my father in terms of in order to deflect the abuse from hereslf, she’ll direct it towards my brother and/or me.In addition, she’ll admonish us for not being loving enough or respectful enough towards our father. She actually sent us an email saying that. She wrapped it up in Taiwanese culture, which is an issue in and of itself.
Here’s another hard truth. Just because something is part of a culture, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. In addition, something that is positive, when taken to an extreme, can turn negative instead. So, yes, it is tradition to respect elders in Taiwanese culture. I don’t think it’s a bad thing–not at all. But when it means that older people get all the consideration and younger people get none, then I have a problem. Also, you can’t force someone to love or respect someone else. You can make them fear that person, yes, but that’s not love or respect.
It made me incredibly sad (and, yes, upset) that my mother was still stuck in the same place now that she had been forty years ago. Still propping up my father, desperately pretending that there was nothing wrong with him. She’s smarter than he is, stronger (internally), and just in general outclasses him in every way, but we can’t talk about that.
Weirdly, though, and this is something I didn’t realize until fairly recently, she does know and think she’s superior to him, but she needs to be a martyr as it’s the core of her identity. She was complaining to me that my father accused her of thinking she was superior to him. I used to defend her and say, if anything, she deferred to him too much. But through a few causal throwaway comments (like knowing he wasn’t as smart as she was when she married him), I realized he’s actually right–though not in the way he meant.
My mother needs to be smarter than her partner. She needs to be the competent one. She would not do well with a partner who is more accomplished than she is, which is an anathema to me. I want someone to challenge me and push me. I want someone who is as smart as I am, if not smarter. I want to be better, and one way to do that is to be with someone better.
I don’t know how I got here, but there you go. I’m done for the day.