I’m obsessed with the idea of boundaries because my parents don’t have any. None. Nada. Zip. They don’t believe their children should have individual personalities. We are reflections of them and therefore must replicate their ideology identically. My brother is the favored child because he is a boy and the oldest. he also followed more of what my parents espouse, but he has come afoul across their beliefs more than once. The way they hold up their ideals makes it impossible to meet them. For example. my mom pushed my brother to have kids for years. Him and his wife. They didn’t have children until 6 years into marriage, which was unheard of in Taiwanese culture. They had three kids with a big gap between one and two, and during that time, my mom pushed me to have kids of my own.
At one point, she was talking to my brother on the phone about being upset that I wasn’t having children. Yes, she did it where I could hear her, probably unconsciously on purpose. She was saying there was a bond between mother and daughter when the daughter had a child. And, there was a saying in Taiwanese about the difference between a son having a child and a daughter having a child, and she was so sad that she wouldn’t get to have that. My brother joked that he could have more children, to which my mother quickly said that he had done enough.
See? You can’t win with her. She was upset that I didn’t have children and upset that my brother had too many.
Side note: my mother has a disconnect between what she thinks she wants and what she actually wants. She has said repeatedly that she always wanted children and being a mother was the most important thing to her from since she was young. She extended that to having grandchildren. It was so important to her, she had to nag me about it for fifteen years (and my brother for the first six of his marriage).
Here’s the rub. She never liked me as a person. She certainly did not like me as a child. I was fat, gawky, awkward, deeply depressed, and a bookworm. She made dresses for me to wear, which I hated. I liked to run around and climb trees, but that was looked down upon by her and the other women in our (Taiwanese) church. I was too boyish, which was not acceptable. Except for playing sports. For some reason, that was fine for women/girls to do, but only in strictly circumscribed circumstances. But I wasn’t supposed to run around, laughing, shouting, and climbing trees. I was supposed to be quiet, sit with my legs shut, and be small. Both physically and mentally.
I spent most of my childhood, miserable for so many reasons. I was fat. Well, I wasn’t really, but my mom was convinced I was. I was chubby. I was solid. I was thicc, yes. But when I look at pictures of me as a kid, I wasn’t grotesquely fat as my mother constantly made me feel I was. She put me on my first diet when I was seven and told me that I would be so pretty if only I lost weight. When I was seven.