After I got out of the hospital, I had to deal with my parents. This was by far the hardest part of the whole ordeal. My mother sent my brother and me this long email about Taiwanese culture and respecting your elders. She said that my brother and I needed to love and respect my father more. She actually wrote that down without wincing at how gross that was.
I’m not saynig that Taiwanese culture is not heavy on elder respect. It is. It’s a patrilineal society–at least it was back in the day. Countries change in time, much as people do. Taiwan was the first Asian countrty to make same-sex marriage legal, and though there have been legislation proposed to change this, it’s still currently legal–more or less. Since that’s not the purpose of this post, I’ll leave it at that for now.They also have a female president and have had her since 2016. In other words, they are more progressive in some ways than we are.
In addition, even though my mother likes to pull out Taiwanese culture like a trump card when she wants to get her way, she refuses to recognize that my brother and I were born and raised in Minnesota. Which, in case you can’t tell, is in the United States of America. We don’t give a shit about elders here! That’s not true, but I’m tempted to say that to my mother when she trots out Taiwanese culture.
The other thing is that not everything about every culture is good. Obviously. There are bad things in every culture so just saying something is part of a culture does not automatically make it worth venerating. I am not against showing respect towards elders, but…and I say this as an elder, it shouldn’t be mindless respect. I’m not saying you have to be disrespectful until they prove their worth, but so many things are covered under the guise of ‘respect your elders’. It’s adjacent to ‘but faaaaaaaaamily’.
My point, though, is that you can’t make someone respect or love someone else. It’s galling that my mother would even think that she had the right to order my brother and me to do that. It’s not surprising, mind, as she’s spent her whole adult life catering to my father and slavering over him. She has made being subjugated to him her entire identity and it’s only gotten worse with time. But it’s frustrating that as a therapist, she cannot understand that you can make anyone feel positive about someone.
She seems to think she can order my brother and me to have different feelings for our father. It smacks my gob that she can’t see that my father is getting the amount of love and respect he deserves. They both think that as parents, they should automatically get both because they are our parents. It’s circular reasoning at best. And, yes, this is probably a more Western way of thinking about things, but I don’t give fealty for no reason.
If my parents were not my parents, I would feel more pity for my mother. She has spent 55 years scraping and bowing to my father, who has only taken it as his just due and gets mad when her attention is off him for even a second. She has bent herself into an unrecognizable pretzel, and she doesn’t even realize it.
Making excuses for him is like second nature to her by now. There is an unspoken code in the family that he is not to be upset in any shape, matter, or size. My mother treats him like a baby/toddler who cannot self-soothe. To be clear, he has a low frustration tolerance (so do I, actually), but I do wonder if back in the first years of their marriage, what would have happened if my mother had put her foot down to my father’s nonsense.