Tag: liberty | A Banana Peeled

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.

So. More on my family because it’s heavy on my mind. I wrote about it at length in the last post and I want to continue with it now. I’ve written at length about what a jerk my father is. I’ve written less, however, about the betrayal of my mother, probably because it hurts more. I expect my father to be a selfish asshole. That’s his brand. He’s been that way my whole life. He only cares about me because I’m his daughter, heavy emphasis on ‘his’. I’m a female-shaped girl child in his mind–my actual personality doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s just a hindrance in his mind. He has very set ideas an what a woman is and he’ll cram me into that rigidity, come hell or high water. Now, while in general, it wasn’t directed at me, in some ways, it was worse because he expected me to agree with him. Or at the very least, he had no compunction about saying it to my face.

The one that is burned into my brain happened a day or two after my brother took them to Costco. I didn’t go because this was a month or so after I left the hospital and I knew I wasn’t ready to brave a Costco run yet. My parents were tired when they got home, which I had expected. Costco is huge and can be overwhelming. A day or two later, my father mentioned going to Costco.

Side note: Here’s the thing you have to know about my father. He’s a shithead. But I’ve been very clear about that. It’s that he gets this look on his face when he’s about to say something offensive. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a cross between a smirk and a cold stare. I’m sure he thinks of it as his thoughtful face, but that isn’t what it is. At all. It’s more a “I’m better than you are in every way even though I’m a sack of shit” face than anything else.

Side note II: The recent visit from my parents really allowed me to see my mother for exactly who she is–an enabler and a martyr. I realized about a decade-and-a-half ago that she was a narcissist, too ,but not to the degree that she really is. It’s been very hard on me to accept that she’s just as damaged and cruel as my father. More so in some ways because she knows that my father is full of shit and protects him, nonetheless. It took me dying for me to realize that my mother would shove me under the bus to preserve the fiction that my father is not what he is.

I told K a month or so after I returned home that my mother would choose my father over me if she could only save one. My brother and I have known since we were little that my father always came first in my mother’s life. And, while I have never wanted children just because I never did, a large part why I never had them was because of how fucked up my mother was as a mother. There was no way I was putting any child of mine into the position of being anywhere near my parents, and even when I was twenty and fucked up, I knew that the best thing I could do for my nonexistent children was to not let them be born. Again, I never wanted children, so it was all theoretical, but my desire to stop the abuse was a big reason I was able to stand firm against my mother’s manipulations and cajoling (for me to have a kid) for fifteen years.

Tag Archives: liberty

Life’s ups and downs

Making like Elsa and letting go