I was musing in the last post about my rebirthday and how it’s coming up. Well, that’s what I meant the post to be about, but I meandered into family dysfunction once again. Which isn’t as far a stretch as you might think, actually. I have spent decades unlearning the toxic things I’ve been taught by my mother.
I’ve talked about this before, but I gave up on my father very early on. I knew from the time I was eight or nine that he did not like being a father. At all. He never interacted with my brother and me willingly other than to tell us to do something. I can’t remember him ever smiling or being happy about anything. He only ate Taiwanese food and was very radical pro-independent Taiwan. I have no issue with the latter, but I had a hunch that he only felt that way beacuse it personally benefited him. Again, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing because no one wants to be oppressed. I’m just saying that he did nothing that didn’t have a personal benefit.
When I went to college, I became a psychology major. I learned about narcissism as a disorder (which no longer exists), and it clicked in my brain. I knew that was my father to a T even if I didn’t have the word for it. With him, it really is as simple as he never thought about anyone other than himself.
Because of this, it was actually easy to understand him. He was consistently self-centered and as long as I kept that in mind, I knew what to expect from him. Oh, and he was a raging misogynist as well. Plus racist/nationalistic, and every other kind of ist. I knew better than to tell him anything of importance. Also, my mother would often tell me not to tell him something or the other because he could not handle it–according to her.
This is classic triangulation, and she was queen of it. Did she honestly think he could not handle the fact that I was bi or that I got a tattoo? Probably. Was she right? Probably. However, in a functional family, it would be up to him to decide how he would react to that information. And to be honest, my mother did not react well to either. At all. So it was ironic that she displaced her discomfort on my father.
How uncomfortable was she? When I got my tat, she mostly pulled a long face and let it stay that way for the whole talk. She commanded me not to tell my father, but I can’t remember if she said anything else. It was clear that she was very displeased, though. I was twenty-two, and I still hadn’t grasped yet just how dysfunctional my family was. In a functional family, she would have voiced her displeasure, but then realize that it was my body and shrugged it off. She never had to actually accept it, but she could have at least been neutral.