Yesterday, I wrote about love in the context of family. Here is the post in which I mused about how complicated it can get and how we don’t talk about the fact that some parents don’t love their children. When I state plainly that my parents don’t love me, even my closest friends have a hard time not rushing in to assure me it’s not the case.
Here’s the thing. I don’t say it to get pity or in an emo way. I’m saying it as factual. My parents don’t love me because they don’t know me. What’s more, they never wanted to know the true me, and at this point in my life, there is no positive to trying to share anything of importance with them.
As I mentioned in the last post, my mother became a mother because it was what was expected of her. Also, she never felt loved in her family, and I think she believed this was the way to earn that love. It didn’t work. My grandmother was also a self-centered, unloving person who bought into the sexist bullshit that boy children were more important/valuable than girl children. She had no interest in me at all. The three or four times I saw her, I don’t think she said one single word to me.
My mother never felt loved by her mother, and I think part of her rabid obsession with being a mother was to create a bond with her mother. The day I turned 26, my mother commented that she had my brother at that age. Which, fine. Whatever. I tucked it away as a fun little fact, but little did I know that was going to be my mother’s mantra for the next fifteen years–trying to get me pregnant, I mean.
By this time, she had moved back to Taiwan. Almost every time we talked, she brought up me having children. When my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, my mother commented that she (my grandmother) would love to be a great-grandmother before she died. She heavily implied that I, as the oldest granddaughter, should be the one to have the child. I jokingly said that it would take too long for me to get married and have a child, but I could do it on my own if she liked.
I was only joking because my family on my mother’s side is deeply evangelical/conservative Christian. The idea of having children outside of marriage (to a person of the opposite gender) was unthinkable. Much to my shock, my mother said she thought her mother would be fine with that. I didn’t say anything, but I thought, “Wow, nice to know her morals are so easily discarded.”