As my parents’ trip comes to an end, I find myself ruminating over the concept of boundaries. Why? Because they are unheard of in my family. Or rather, they are set up haphazardly and followed only when the person feels like it/wants to/can be stuffed to do it.
Let me start by saying my mom is a psychologist. Theoretically, this should mean that she knows about boundaries and is enthusiastic about setting them. The reality is much different as she is often the worst offender for many reasons–which I’ll get into later. In addition, she’s Taiwanese, and the culture is different when it comes to boundaries. Family is paramount (though it might be changing as all cultures change), and children are expected to put the needs of the family first. I remember one time several years back when I was still in therapy and my mother expressed concerns that my therapist was putting a wedge between us. It took all of my will not to blurt out that it was necessary and that my therapist was keeping me from screaming at her all the time. This was during the time where talking to her (or my father) for more than ten minutes made me want to poke my eyes out, and it’s not hyperbole to say that it depressed me for hours after each time.
That’s part of the problem. Yes, the Taiwanese culture has more porous familial boundaries, but my family is also dysfunctional. The two are not mutually exclusive, but I didn’t realize any of this until I was in my twenties. Of course, you think the childhood you grow up in is normal until you get out of the situation and then you realize that your family is banana crackers crazy. For example, my father has a bizarre idea of saving face. Now, most people know that saving face is a big thing in many Asian cultures. My father takes it to an extreme, however, and it’s partly because of his narcissistic personality. I remember a time when I was a teenager and one of my parents’ friends called to ask for my father. I innocently said he wasn’t home because he was playing tennis. My parents were big into tennis when I was a kid, playing with their friends from church. When my parents got home and I gave my father the message, he exploded at me for telling the (female, and it’s important) friend that he was out with other friends. He went on this rant on how it made him look bad and she would feel excluded. Even as a teenager in my dysfunctional family I knew it was out of line, but I didn’t really suss out why he freaked out to that extent until much later.
You see, my father is a serial cheater. He’s been having affairs ever since I can remember. I can’t tell you when I first realized this fact about him, but I know he started staying out until midnight ‘working late’ when I was as young as six or seven. My parents had epic fights over this until my father gradually accepted this was the price of admission to her marriage. I figured out in the tennis situation, not only did it feed my father’s rabid obsession with his personal privacy (only for him), the woman who called was probably his ‘special lady friend’ at the time, and he was probably playing with another woman who could be considered attractive. To clarify, he and my mom were playing, but that never stopped him from paying special attention to his lady of the moment.
Everyone knew. It was a poorly-kept secret, but no one ever talked about it. People in my extended family mentioned they knew, and it’s only been fairly recent that I have had discussions about it with my mother and my brother (separately). He currently has a mistress, possibly two, and, yet, my mother still dances around him, catering to his every whim. I will get to that more in a minute or maybe in another post depending on how I feel after writing about boundaries.
The background: My parents get up much earlier than I do, so by the time I get up, they’re ready to chat. To be fair, my mother is ready to chat all the fucking time, but I’ll put that aside with difficulty. And, as they’re getting older, they’ve become more clingy and needy. I understand that part is natural of the aging process, but I just can’t handle it the minute I wake up. I live alone, and I can go days without actually speaking with someone in person. They would pelt me with questions, requests/orders, and whatever else was on their minds. I finally had to tell them that I needed to do my morning routine first before I was in any shape to talk. I enforced this by going downstairs to do my morning routine. Did that help? Yes and no. Yes because it kept them away from me in general. No because if they really wanted something, they just went downstairs to present me with their pressing (to them) concern.
Side note: My mother suffers from almost crippling anxiety. Almost because she’s still functional, but it’s crippling to me because her vocalized anxiety feeds into my unspoken anxiety. It’s gotten worse in the last few years, and I have a hunch it’s because my father retired at roughly the same time. To say that he’s critical is an understatement, and he has the ability to radiate anger and disapproval without saying a word.
In the last week, my mother has come downstairs twice to interrupt my routine, and to make matters worse, she prefaces it by apologizing and then barging in with what she wants anyway. Quite frankly, if she’s going to interrupt me, I’d rather she just do it. It adds insult to injury for her to preempt it by apologizing. Both times, what she wanted had to do with my father, and that’s the thing that really irritated me.
Let me explain. My father had promised his niece that he would buy something for her while he was here. It’s called Bee Propolis, and don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it because I hadn’t, either. It’s some kind of nasal spray/throat spray with all the woo woo that the name implies. That doesn’t mean it’s not effective or real, but I’m skeptical. Anyway, he mentioned it a few weeks ago, and we tried to find it at Target. They didn’t have it. My parents went to a Walmart, freaked out within two seconds of going in, and left without even querying if they had it. I searched online, and I found four or five places that had it online, but not in-store. My father didn’t mention it again, and I thought it was not an issue. Three nights ago, (Thursday night) we were planning to meet with my brother for dinner one last time either Friday night or Saturday night. My brother suggested Saturday night which was what I preferred. My father wanted Friday night, and I explained why I preferred Saturday night, which, as I mentioned, my brother suggested in the first place.
My father got that particular look on his face, the mulish one that makes me want to punch him, and he kept pushing for Friday night because Saturday night was the night before they were leaving and they might want to do some last minute shopping. That made no sense to me because they could shop Friday morning, Friday evening, Saturday morning, or Sunday morning. After we settled dinner on Saturday, I could hear my father and my mother talking in the dining room, and my father was upset. Fifteen minutes later, my mother came out and told me why my father was so insistent on dinner on Friday night.
Side note 2: I really hate that my father makes my mother do the dirty work because he knows I’m more likely to listen to her than him. Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to lower himself to talk to the plebe (me). Whichever, it pisses me the fuck off, and it did in that situation as well. My father’s reasoning was specious and more to the point, had he told me it was important even two days earlier, I could have ordered it online and gotten it by the time they left. As it was, there was no hope of that, and I spent two hours trying to find a place locally that had it.
Side note 3: I hate websites that don’t make it clear what is available in-store and what you can only order online. It’s mostly the huge chains, and you would think they could spend a few coins saying what is actually available in their goddamn stores. Calling the stores doesn’t help, either, which is annoying.
Anyway, it was CVS. I promised my mom I would take Dad in the morning so she could get her work done. In the morning, I went downstairs to do my morning routine, and my mom came down to ask if I was going to take my father to the store. I had said I was, and it was only her anxiety that made her ask me again. That and the fact that my father was probably grumbling about it.
Here’s the point about boundaries (finally). I’ve read Captain Awkward, Dear Prudence, and even Ask A Manager on the issue of boundaries, so I know how to set them. I even did that with little issue. They give great advice in affirming the boundaries, but it hinges on me being able to follow through on it. In the above example, the way to enforce the boundary would have been to say something like, “I am doing my morning routine. I will answer your question when I’m done.” In reality, though, it was easier to tell her the answer to get her to go away. I would feel stupid to make a big deal over such a ‘little’ thing (in quotes because I fully realize it’s not a little thing, but it feels that way), and I also know that her anxiety is in part real because my father can be very unpleasant when he doesn’t get his way.
That’s the biggest problem. If it were just my father and me, I would shut it down hard. I don’t like him radiating anger at me, but I can deal with it. I’m bigger than he is, and I can take him if it comes to that. It never has, but it feels like it could. If my mother weren’t in the middle, I would not do his bullshit whims. That’s why I suspect he makes her do it in the first place. I don’t want to make things harder on her, but I also don’t want to enable her codependency. It’s hard, and I don’t have an answer to it. Fortunately, I won’t have to deal with it in person for another year.