Tag: parentification | A Banana Peeled

Tag Archives: parentification

Family dysfunction: the gift that keeps on giving

Posted on June 1, 2023 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I have pretty much given up on Slate advice columns because I don’t like most of the columnists and, to be frak, the commentariat is….not my cup of tea in general. Or rather, I never know which way they’re going to swing, and it’s frustrating to me. For the most part, I can guess which way they are agoing to go, but every once in a while, they take me by complete surprise. Most of the time, though, I know what they are going to say. I’s usually pretty pragmatic, except when it comes to anyone who is a minority, then pragmaticism goes out the window and all kinds of isms come flying in. The only time when they actually acknowldege any ism is when it’s sexism–probably because more than half the commentariat are women.

We all know that people are self-centered. This is a given, and not even a bad tihng. Of course you’re going to thnk about things from your own point of view–that’s what being a human is. But, the problem is when you (general you) can’t see why/how someone else would think differently. and you assume that they are wrong/weird/crazy for thinking the way they do.

I really don’t like Doyin Richards from Care and Feeding because he relates everything to himself and because he’s, well, mean to his kid.s Such as telling them that their things are not theirs because he bought them, and he’s just letting them use them. That’s not tough love, that’s just cruel.

For whatever reason, I decided to read his column today. Much to my surprise, I actually agreed with his answers for the most part. But it might be because the first two questions were just so out there, anyone could have answered them easily. It’s the second question that really grinded my gears. The mother who ‘wears her heart on her sleeve’ and doesn’t want to stifle herself for her kids. She overheard them talk about how they didn’t go to her for anything because she was so sensitive. This was what she said:

I am deeply hurt that my kids choose to believe that they have to walk on eggshells around me, but this is who I am.

Are you fucking kidding me? Wow. She went on to say more words, but this just smacked my gob. If you noticed, she was fully invested in ‘this is how I am’, but she also said that her children were choosing to walk on eggshells around her. She couldn’t help who she was, but they could, apparently. The two kids (13F and 16M, the latter is the oldest. The way it’s phrased, there are other kids, sadly) were talking about how they she would freak out over little things like no more milk. The oldest son said that he learned in elementary school that he could not go to her for anything.

Now. I am not a parent. But If I were and my kids said something like this, I would be mortified. I would take to heart what they said and work on changing it. She went on to say that she didn’t think it was fair that she be expected to change a huge part of who she was for something as silly as her children’s feelings. No, she did not phrase it taht way, but it was very evident in her attitude.

Doyin nailed this by saying while it was hard to hear, she needed to get a therapist ASAP to deal with it because she was making it unsafe for her kids. he also called bullshit on her saying that she did not ask her kids to change their own behavior. He said, “If you saw them hurting someone, you’d just stand by with your thumb up your ass and not say anything?” Paraphrased, of course, but pretty much what he said.

Private versus personal and reasonable boundaries

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

When I was a kid, I was taught that there was nothing about the family that you could say to anyone not in the family. I’m not talking about big things like marital difficulties (though, that, of course, was also verboten), but about the little things. The story I tell over and over goes like this. My parents went to play tennis with their friends all the time. One time, they were out with a friend playing tennis. Another friend called and asked for my father. I said he was out playing tennis.

It didn’t seem like a big deal to me. When my parents came home, my father flipped his shit at me. He told me that I shouldn’t have said that to the other friend, which confused the hell out of me. I asked why because I truly didn’t undrestand. I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but what was the big deal about going to play tennis with some friends. My father said that the other friend would feel left out, which didn’t make sense to me, either.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized the issue. My father was playing with his current special ladyfriend (and her husband. And my mather). My father has had a mistress since–well, probably since dating my mother. He certainly has had one since I was a little kid. My mother has been crying about it for fifty years. He always had one in the wings as well–a backup in case he got bored with the current one. Which he often did.

I wouldn’t have thought the other friend was his type because he liked really feminine women–but, on the other hand, he married my mother who was not a typically feminine woman. The other friend was more like my mother than my father’s usual type. At any rate, at some point, she cut herself off from the Taiwanese community, and I would not be surprised if my father was part of the reason why.

Anyway, he was mad that I had told his potential mistress that he was with his current mistress. He was by nature a very sly person. He kept things close to the vest and only doled out information as needed. As he deemed it to be so, I mean, not the more universal meaning of the word. It was impenetrable until you realize that it just meant what put him in the best light. That’s it.

My point is that I was taught that you don’t tell anyone anything. Period. No matter how seemingly innocuous it seemed, it was an outrage to say anything to anyone about anything. It was like his penny-pinching ways. He would scrutinize every penny spent (one time he was here recently, he complained about kiwis being two for a dollar), but then he’d spend a hundred bucks on a water pick he never used. It sat unopened on a shelf for years. It wasn’t even that it was a hundred bucks (which was a lot of money, but not excessive), but that he bought it on impulse and never used it.

In the same way, he hoarded information about himself, and in general was not happy with any of it being told to anyone unless he approved it first.

On the flip side, my mother told everyone everything. Not when it came to my father, maybe, but everything else was fair game. And even with my father, she could never keep her own dicta. For her fiftieth anniversary, she really wanted to go on a cruise. She told my brother to pay for it and tell my father that he had paid for it, while she would send him (my brother) the money. I found out later from my brother that my mother told my father that she had paid for it at some point.

That’s her to the core. She can’t keep a secret for the life of her. When I had my medical crisis, she was telling everyone and their sister about it. The Uber driver. The cleaner. Probably the mailman if she talked to him. She got mad at me when I said maybe she could dial it back.

“It’s my life, too!” She said heatedly. Well, yes. But it’s primarily my life. And I think I should get to decide who gets to know the details of what happened to me (outside of the medical system, of course).