When my mother was here last during my medical crisis, I foolishly decided to show her the Sword Form. Why? Because I was drugged up and thought it would be a good idea. Why? Stop questioning me! I don’t know. I honestly don’t. It’s because I love my weapons so much and maybe I wanted to connect with my mother. Which is so stupid of me. There has never been a time in the history of ever when she cared and/or understood what I was trying to tell/show her.
Me being bi? That meant I wanted to fuck animals. Tattoos? Oh, she was not pleased by that at all. Of course, she didn’t approve of me relinquishing my religion (and had people pray at me to ‘bring me back into the fold’. Didn’t work, by the way). She said I was shirking my duty as a womn by not having children, and she encouraged me to get married so I’d have someone to take care of me in my old age. She relentlessly nagged at me for me being fat because she was concerned about my health, she said. But, when I was anorexic and painfully thin, she was only jealous of my tiny waist.
She tried to be encouraging about my writing, but the only thing she said when I let her read a short story I had written was how it had ‘so many’ swear words in it. I can’t remmeber a time when she complimented me or appreciated me full-stop without any qualifiers. Oh, wait. Yes, I can. She was thankful when I listened to her dump her problems on me because she ‘needed’ it.
Needless to say, when she told me how grateful she was that I was still alive, I internally rolled my eyes. She only cared because I was her unpaid therapist. Not even a therapist because she didn’t listen to anything I suggested. Or rather, very few things. She did not care about me the person, which is something that people have a hard time believing. A mother is supposed to care about her child! Rightly or wrongly, this is more embedded in our society than a father loving his child.
In this case, neither is correct. Neither of my parents love me as a person. They love the idea of their daughter as an extension of them, but me, Minna, the difficult, messy, complicated person? Nope!
Oh, I forgot to say that when I told my mother I was studying Taiji, she said that it was a way of inviting the devil to dance on my spine. How or why she came up with that, I do not know, but it’s almost poetic.
Anyway, when I showed my mother the Sword Form, it was the first three or four movements. She gave the uncomfortable laugh she does when she doesn’t like something and then said, “Oh, ah, it’s cute.”