Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: dementia

More thoughts on family, dysfunction, and letting go

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I’ve been talking in the past several posts about my family, and here is something I rarely admit out loud. One of the reasons I get so frustrated when my mother goes down the negativity route is becuase it echoes the monkey chatter in my brain as well. I can ‘what if’ until the cows come home, and it makes it so it’s really difficult for me to make an actual decision about anything important.

When I was in my twenties, K and I talked about how different our mothers were. Her mother was very much a ‘things will work out, no matter what’ kind of person, whereas my mother had a ‘something will always go drastically wrong, no matter what’ mentality. This came out when K was taking me to the airport and joking about me having a roll of quarters, an umbrella, and a bunch of other things she thought unnecessary. I said you never knew what you might need when you were on vacation.

Years later, I realized t hat as long as I had proper Id and my credit card, I could buy anything I needed. A huge privilege, yes, and not something I wanted to abuse, but it really eased the anxious part of my brain.

That’s something I learned in my twenties/early thirties. I had to find ways to work around the destructive chatter in my brain. I had to build that into everything I did because it was just a part of me. It makes it harder for me to do things, but I’ve gotten better in the last few years. In some ways. In other ways, it’s gotten worse.

K and I talked about the pros and cons to our mothers’ ways of thinking. With K’s mother, a pro was that she did not have to expend too much energy on ‘what ifs?’. She assumed things would turn out ok, and that must have been a relief. On the other hand, when things didn’t turn out ok, she was ill-equipped to deal with it.

Whtereas with my mother’s Debbie Downer mentality meant that she was always prepared for the worst, but didn’t know what to do if things did not reach that point. In addition, in always looking at the negative side of things, it paralyzes her from actually making decisions because any choice seems bad.

This is what I hate the most because it’s how I deal with things as well. I can see a million things that could possibly go wrong at any given time, and I can’t see a way forward. Rationally, I know that every decision has consequences, both good and bad. I know that there is no choice that is completely positive.

And yet. My brain equates negative consequences with catastrophe, and then I can’t make any choice at all. I have to consciously push my way past that mental barrier in order to make a decision.


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How dementia ruins everything, part two

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I know that I can only change myself. I mention that because I’ve been musing about family and getting frustrated with my parents. Different reasons for each one, but frustration just the same. I don’t bring any of it to my father because he can’t help how he is (dementia), and it’s just how he was before, but worse. Actually, that’s the hardest part. He’s hitting me in all my sensitive spots, but I have to just remind myself that he’s not himself. But he is. But he isn’t. Before I get to that, here’s yesterday’s post.

Here’s the problem. My father before his dementia was a selfish, or rather, self-absorbed person who never thought of anyone else. He was also deeply sexist and said sexist shit to me all the time. Here are some brief examples. He was always scolding me for not putting on a jacket when he was cold. He never asked if I were cold, which I rarely was. Now, one of the things he asks about often is the weather. And he gets stuck in the loop of being concerned that I’m cold.

In general, he doesn’t think women can do anything for themselves. Or rather, that’s what he tells himself even while my mother does everything around the house. This was even before his dementia, by the way. He’s been like this all my life. I know it’s a self-protective mechanism, but it’s so ugly and distasteful.

Fortunately, the explicit sexist shit does not show up, but it does rear its ugly head in sly ways. Such as, him repeatedly asking me how I get places. He knows (or knew) that I drive, but he has somehow forgotten that. To be fair, I can’t say that’s for sure a sexist thing, but it certainly feels like it. Also, his harping on my health might be because of the medical crisis, but I have a hunch it’s more a neg than anything else.

That’s the problem with my father–past behavior has shown me not to give him the benefit of the doubt. I know who he was in the past, and it’s hard not to apply that to the present. But he’s not resonsible in the present for…how do I put this? He’s not of sound mind (dunno about body). So he’s not trying to be offensive on purpose, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a quick flash of ‘not this shit again’.

However. The cruelty of the dementia has far outranked the impatience I feel when he hits one of my buttons. It’s really sad what’s happening to him and since I only talk to him for five minutes (at most ten) at a time, I can deal with the bullshit that comes with it.


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The cruelty of dementia only intensifies

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I intended to write a post about dementia, which I still will. However, today on Ask A Manager, there was a post from a man who is in the same industry as his well-known (and well-loved) father. The letter writer (LW) is estranged from his father, and he wrote in because they are both up for prominent awards in different categories. People seem to assume they’re in entertainment, which does make sense. Anyway, the LW did not want to take any pics with his father (which he feared the organizers would want for marketing/promo reasons), and he wanted a diplomatic way to tell the organizers that he didn’t want to be seated at a table with his father, either. I learned in the comments that Angelina Jolie’s children are speaking out about how awful Brad Pitt is (some are his biological children and some are not). I am not surprised by it, but it just brought out a feeling of profound sadness as did reading the comments.

So many people with abusive parents with whom they were either estranged or low-contact. In a weird way, it was comforting to know I wasn’t the only one. Also, to see a steady stream of ‘it’s not your problem’ as to the question about what to do in this situation (in response to managing the father’s emotions or other people’s reactions to the situation.

It’s hard. It’s isolating. It’s lonely. Having very dysfunctional parents, I mean. In my case, it’s tempered by the fact that my father has dementia–which is just getting worse by the day. I talk to my parents on the average of once every other week or so, but during the trying times, my mom has been known to call me several days in a row.

I have accepted that I am her therapist/emotional support person. I do what I can to not let it bring me down, but I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I heave a small sigh of weariness as soon as I hear her voice. Not to mention a constriction in my chest. I have to put up a shield as best I can and not let it get to me too much.

Side note: I gave up on my parents being parents to me a long time ago. I never expected it from my father because he has never been a good parent. In fact, I would say he hasn’t been a parent at all except monetarily. He once hounded me to know if I was grateful for the money he had spent on me/given to me, and  I was in a very rebellious state at the time (mid-twenties), full of seething resentment over so many things. I was so very angry, and I was not having any of his shit. This is me saynig that I was a brat at the time .I will fully acknowledge that I was not at my best.

However, with his next line, he destroyed any illusion that he wanted to be my father. Or rather, that he knew what being a father meant. He looked at me with such hatred in his eyes and said, “Why should I love you then?”

And with that, I saw him for who he really was. There was no way to hide the man behind the curtain any longer. I mean, I knew before then that he did not love me and that he never really wanted to be a father, but it was unspoken and merely felt. See, in our family, we don’t say that shit out loud.


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Dementia is terrible, part four

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I’m talking about dementia wrapped in family dysfunction. In the last post, I ended by mentioning that dementia is seen as a moral failing in Taiwan, which has added to the stress of my father’s situation. The problem is that my mother has absorbed that message to some extent. Plus, she’s still in denial that it’s a progressive medical issue that only goes one way. She still thinks she can find a way to reverse it, which has lead to some not-so-great actions on her part towards my father. Like pushing him to do more exercise than he wants to do, for example.

Look. My father is turning 85 in less than 2 months. He has dementia and is in a rapid decline. Let the man do what he wants to do at this point! If that means lying in bed and sleeping all day long, so be it. My mother has said that she doesn’t know what she’ll do when he dies. She has cried that she is not ready for him to die. Which, I get. She’s lived with him for over a half-century. Her life IS him. But, and I cannot express this strongly enough, she is not doing HIM any favors by denying reality.

This is something I’ve thought of several times over the decades. How abuse creates more abuse. I know people don’t like to talk about it, but poeple who are constantly abused adapt in ways that may be considered abusive in response. Not just to the person who is abusing them, but to other people around them (such as their children). I know that some of the coping skills I learned from growing up with my parents absolutely made me abusive in return. It made  me a terrible partner in my teens and twenties, and I am still undoing the damage decades later.

In this case, my mother has–oh, by the way. This is going to be more about my mother’s dysfunctional ways than dementia in general, but I’ll still probably talk about the latter–adapted to the aubse she suffered in a very maladaptive way. It’s in part because she was raised in a very dysfunctional family (abuse is generational) in which she felt like she was not loved or wanted. Her mother should not have been a mother, either, which seems to be something else handed down in the family.

A story my mother told me when I was in my twenties has haunted me since. When she was a kid (I don’t know what age, but I’m thinking 10 or 11), the wife of her pastor took a real shine to her. I’m guessing the pastor and his wife did not have kids of their own. The wife wanted to adopt my mother, and my mother actually considered it. In the end, she decided she couldn’t do it because it just wasn’t done.


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Dementia is terrible, part three

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I’m back to talk more about dementia. At the end of the last post, I veered into talking about how my mother nags and nags until she gets what she wants. She’s been that way all her life, and she taught all of us, including my father, to give in more often than not. Maybe not my father. They had so many shouting matches over seemingly everything, and the environment flipped back and forth between angry yelling and stony silence.

My parents should never have married. I know that sounds harsh, but I honestly think that they would have each had a better life if they never married. No, wait. That’s not true. That’s assuming that they would have gone in different directions and grown as people. My parents are in their eighties and have been married for over half a century. They met in Tennessee where both were getting their graduate degrees (at different schools). My mother had been engaged to someone in Taiwan because her mother wouldn’t let her date unless she was engaged. Which is bonkers to me, but that’s Taiwan in the early sixties, apparently. At least my grandmother’s mentality, at any rate.

She was a piece of work–I’ll tell you that much. I met her maybe five times in my life, and she left a terrible impression on me. Stern, domineering, woman/girl-hating, selfish, and just an unpleasant person in general. My mother had a very rocky relationship with her (because they were very similar), and she was honest with me that one reason she wanted a daughter so desperately was so she could have a better relationship with her daughter than she had with her mother.

Which, by the way, is not a good reason to have a daughter. Or a child in general. My mother has told me that she wanted to be a mother since she was a little girl. She says it’s the most important thing in her life, but she doens’t act as if it is. She wasa dutiful mother when my brother and I were kids, She cooked, cleaned, took care of us, etc. She was almost a single mother in the way she had no help from my father.

My father definitely would have married another doormat to wipe his feet upon if he hadn’t married my mother. The cold hard truth is that he needed someone to take care of him because he wasn’t going to do it himself. When he was president of his company, he had a secretary who would print his emails out, put them on his desk for him to read, and then type up his handwritten response into an email.


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Dementia is terrible, part two

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I was talking about my father’s dementia yesterday. In my own meandering way, I was grieving for…what exactly, I’m not sure. Not my relationship with my father because that’s always been strained. That’s putting it politely.

I’ll be blunt. We don’t have a relationship; we never have. My father spent most of my childhood not in the house. I am not going to get into all that, but he and my mother had a very fraught marriage from the start. He cheated on her constantly, and he never bother keeping it a secret. I knew about it once I hit my teens–maybe even before that–because my mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven.

My father claimed to be working until midnight every day. Yeah, right. ‘Working’. Is that what the kids are calling it these days? He was fucking around–and he never found out. It was an open secret at our church that he always had a piece on the side–from the church.

My father never went to any of my activities. I was in dance, orchestra, softball, cello, and theater at various times in my life. I can count on one hand the number of times he showed up to one of my activities, and that was when my mother made him go.

I didn’t mind, honestly. He was such a negative presence in my life–holy shit. I just thought of something. My ex-SIL was someone who sucked the joy out of the room. She was so unhappy all the time, and she made it her life’s mission to make everyone aroundher miserable as well. I don’t think it was a conscious decision on her part, but she was just so unrelentingly negative. And I’m saying that as someone who is fairly negative myself.

My father is the same. He doesn’t find any joy in anything. There are things that he likes doing, but he rarely smiles unbidden. He doesn’t like any food. Well, he likes Taiwanese food, and very few specific American dishes. The cod dinner from Culver’s and the burger from Smashburger were two of them. His favorite, though, was the brisket my brother made the last time they came. This was Thanksgiving after my medical crisis. Keep in mind that my father never praises anything. After he ate the brisket, he said it was the best thing he had ever eaten. Unprompted.


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Dementia is terrible

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My father has dementia. He has had it for over twenty years ago. He’s almost 85, which means it was early-onset dementia. It also meant that we weren’t sure what it was for quite some time. It was obvious he was failing, but we did not know why. He retired around that time, and my mother explained that it was political. In Taiwan. the KMT are like the Republicans and the DPP are like the Democrats. That’s a gross simplification, but it’ll work for my purposes in this post.

My dad worked for a company that has the KMT in all the top positions. This is not unusual. When they were in charge, they had all the top positions. Despite all that, my father rose in the ranks because he was damn good at what he did. In a country that ran on corruption and bribes, he was upright and righteous. In a country where you were almost forced to drink to excess (it was in the culture), my father earned the nickname of ‘one glass Hong’ because he never accepted more than one glass of alcohol (and didn’t drink it).

When he was vice president, I visited him at his company once. The president was KMT, corrupt, and a thorough jerk to boot. Sexually harrassed the women who worked at his company with impunity and made everyone drink with him–whether they wanted to or not. When I met him, it was at a dinner. He was chugging down the vodka by the bottle, and his acolytes/employees/hapless vicitims were meeting him glass for glass. My dad was nursing his one glass (and never bringing it to his lips). I was drinking nothing. I awas accepting nothing. I don’t drink. At all. Well, back then, I probably had two G&Ts with K every six months or so.  I gave up drinking completely–that makes it sound way more serious than it was–when I was forty.

I went out with some friends and had some frothy drink. It had ice cream and chocolate in it (before I gave up gluten and dairy), and my thought was, “This is delicious–or it would be without the alcohol.” That’s when I realized that I was a grown-ass woman. I did not have to drink alcohol if I did not want to. And I have not since. And I don’t miss it at all. Oh, and I’m allergic to alcohol as all East Asians are. We’re missing the gene that processes the booze. That’s why we turn red in the face.

Back to my father’s ex-boss. He kept pusing vodka on me, and he seemed nonplused when I said no. And kept saying no. I was not going to let him push me into drinking. I was not about that at all. It’s such a part of Taiwan’s business culture, though. Drinking to great excess, I mean.


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Dementia, dysfunction, and depression

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Dementia is brutal. I knew this, of course, but I didn’t know this until my father got it. I wrote yesterday about not knowing when it was dementia and when it was dysfunction, and let me throw depression into the mix. Depression for my father because of course the dementia is making him depressed. I’m saying that sincerely, by the way. I’m not being snarky, though it’s hard to know the difference with me sometimes. Ofcourse it would be depressing not to know who you were or what was happening or who was around you on a regular basis. It has to feel so unstable when things are constantly shifting as to what you think you know.

So, yaeh. Of course my father is depressed! And my mother isn’t helping when she tries to insist on reality. I know it has to hurt her that my father doesn’t recognize her (or thinks she’s Ecco, his wife, but not Grace, my mother. Both are her names, by the way. The former is what he calls her in Taiwanese while the latter is her American name), but her trying to correct him over and over again is just making things worse.

This is something that frustrates the hell out of me. She is a psychologist. This is Dementia 101. Don’t argue with someone with dementia. It’s not being kind–in fact, it’s actively cruel. I couldn’t believe I had to tell her this. THat is something even people without psych degrees should know. But, no. She said she could not lie to him, and I got so impatient telling her it wasn’t lying. He wasn’t going to remember it in five seconds, anyway.

When I talk to him, I agree with whatever he says. Even if I don’t like it. This is where it gets tricky for me. He has been nasty all my life about women in general and me in particular. He’s said things like ‘the common housewife can’t figure out CostCo’ and boy did I have several things to say to this. This was the last time he was here. He was not in dementia when he said it so I felt no restraint in arguing with him. I still shouldn’t have because it was pointless, but I couldn’t help it. He’s so good at pushing my buttons, mainly because he (along with my mother) installed them.

Another thing he said that was more pointed at me demonstrated the layers and levels to his manipulation. At the dinner table, he started talking about how he was not a doctor while having that look on his face. It’s hard to describe, but I know he’s going to say something spectacularly out there when he has it on his face. Something that is going to annoy/irritate/anger me because of how baseless/uninformed/mean-spirited it is. This time, it was him rambling about how germs worked. In his opinion, the pores on your skin opens up more when it’s cold.

That in itself is factually untrue. This is not something you need to be a doctor to understand. Steam opens up the pores. Steam is hot. Therefore, the converse is true as well. Cold makes your pores smaller. I said this to my father, and he just sat there with a blank look on his face. I knew the folly of what I was doing, and yet, I could not stop. This was one of my big flaws–I got sucked into arguing with my parents when I knew it didn’t make a whiff of difference. In this case, I didn’t know why he was bringing it up, anyway. The pores being bigger or smaller when you’re cold/hot, I mean. It had nothing to do with what we were talking about, and he had brought it up apropos of nothing.


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When dementia meets dysfunction

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Dementia is brutal. I’m not making an inflammatory statement by saying that, I think. It takes no prisoner and leaves everyone it comes in contact with hurt, battered, and bruised. Emotionally, if not physically. There is no reasoning with it nor is there any way to get around it.

In the last post about this subject, I talked about how my mother made me her emotional support person when I was eleven, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Well, to be more specific, that it’s only gotten worse in the last few years. Not coincidentally, it’s when my father’s dementia took a turn for the worse. I remember before the pandemic, they came here in 2019. Yes, my father was forgetful back then. Yes, it was clear (to me) that he had dementia. Yes, he slipped now and again when it came to who I was. But he was still mostly there.

I do remember, though, the one example that drove home the point that he had dementia.  We had gone to the C-PAP provider because he nedeed a new mask. I drove them there and was waiting in the waiting room. I was called in because my father wasn’t understanding what the rep was telling him. So I had to explain to him–in English–what the rep had said to him–also in English. It was really bizarre.

Later that night, my father came into the living room where I was. He had the mask in his hand and a puzzled look on his face. He asked me to explain it to him. I did, and he went away satisfied. Until the next night. Then, he came back with the mask again, the same look of puzzlement on his face, and he asked me to explain to him how the mask worked. He did this every night he was there, and there was no indication on his face that he had any idea he had asked the exact same thing several nights in a row.

That’s when it hit home that he actually had dementia.

The difficult thing is that my father has been a raging narcissist all his life. He doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t affect him. If he’s not interested, he simply won’t listen. You cannot MAKE him listen. So, there was part of me that thought he was just not listening. Until the third or fourth night when he asked me yet again. That’s when I realized that he actually couldn’t retain what I was saying, and it wasn’t him being a jerk.


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I’m so tired

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I’m so tired. Not physically, though that as well, but of being my mother’s emotional dumping vessel–which has been my role in her life since I was eleven. You know that saying, “Not my monkey, not my circus”? My mother would trounce all over that statement and throw it in the trash. She once complained about my last therapist because she (my therapist) was turning me against my mother (in my mother’s point of view).

“We were so close,” she lamented, with thet unspoken addition of ‘until SHE came along’. Which was completely untrue. We were never close. She meant that I was more docile before I saw my last therapist–but that wasn’t true, either.

The reality is that my mother and I have never been close in the sense of knowing, trusting, and respecting each other. We are close only in that she has made it a lifetime habit of dumping all her shit on me and acting all hurt and victomized if I dare say that she should not do that.

To make it even worse, a few decades ago, she apologized for it and said that she should not have done that to me when I was a kid. Which, fine, but it didn’t stop her from doing it. In other words, it was horseshit. It’s the same as when she was last here. She would complain about my father and then say that she shouldn’t do it. Then she said she wouldn’t do it again. I finally had to tell her to stop saying that because we both knew it iwasn’t true. And it was just making me angrier for her to keep apologizing with no intent of stopping.

It was the only thing she knew how to do, and it had served her…not well, but she deluded herself into thinking it did. Here is my post from yesterday wihch is tangentially related. The thing is that she has learned she can often get what she wanted by simply persisting. Basically, nagging me into submission. I had to learn that it was better for me to stand up on the big things and give in on the small ones.

Yes, it reinforced her belief that it was the way to get what she wanted, but it also gave me peace about the big things. So going on the cruise for my parents fiftieth anniversary? That was a hard no. Going back to Taiwan with my brother’s family? Hell to the no. I nearly killed myself the last time I went to Taiwan (and that is not an exaggeration), and I was not going through that again.

The story I always give about the last time I went to Taiwan to show how little I mean to my mother is that I asked to do exactly one thing on that trip. I wanted to go to the National Palace Museum because I love museums. I had been there once before, but of course once was not enough. It was the only thing I asked to do in the ten days we were there.


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