I’ve been big upping myself lately, which I’m fine with. There are a few things about myself, however, that really annoy the fuck out of me. Some are different since I got out of the hospital, but some are, annoyingly, the same since I was a kid.
The biggest one is my manic need to people-please. This started when I was a kid and had to tiptoe around my parents’ (yes, plural) moods. It wasn’t just my father and his violent mood swings, but also my mother and her constant depression. She should have seen a therapist when she was first married, but her belief was therapy for thee, but not for me (her). Instead, she dumped it all on me and expected me to caretake her. Not my brother because he was a boy and because he was not good with emotions. But I, on the other hand, had to be her emotional dumping grounds because I was female and because I was extremely sensitive to other people’s emotions. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been as sensitive to people’s emotions if my mother hadn’t forced me to be her confidante when I was eleven. I feel like my sensitivity is innate, but it’s hard to say when I had to do it for my mother 24/7. I can’t help but sense what other people are feeling, no matter how much I tried to shield myself from it. Even when it’s a chat and people are typing, I can sense what people are feeling.
And I’m always eager to step in and make sure that no one feels left out. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but I push it to the extreme. It’s not my job to make sure everyone feels included, but it certainly feels like it.
I’m trying to pull back a bit, but it’s not easy to change a lifetime habit. It doesn’t help that my mother still insists on dumping all her emotional drama on me. She tries to say it’s part of being a child (duty to parents’ emotional well-being or some such bullshit), which may be more true in Taiwan than it America, but not to the extent that she insists it is.
If I were to tell her the brutal truth, I would say that I didn’t have kids in part because of her. I hated the idea of fucking up another generation with the deep family dysfunction. I knew that if I had kids, I would not have been strong enough to protect them from my parents. If I wanted children at all, that might be a hard decision, but because I never wanted them, it was easy-peasy. When my mother said she would come back to help with my kids if I had them (which, yeah, sure. Not if my father didn’t want to move back), I almost had a panic attack. Remember, I never wanted kids, but just the mere thought of my mother being around my mythical children made me want to move somewhere without giving her a forwarding address.