Underneath my yellow skin

Too sensitive, my yellow ass

All my life, I’ve been told I’m too sensitive. Mostly by my mother as a way to manipulate my emotions. That might not be her intent, but that’s the effect, which is more important in the end. I learned quickly as a kid that my emotions didn’t matter–and more to the point, I was not allowed to have negative emotions. Only my father was permitted to be angry, for example. And only my mother was allowed to complain. She used to complain constantly to me when I was young–starting from when I was eleven–about my father and their relationship. Any time I tried to bring up my own issues, however, I was quickly shut down. Or, she would turn the conversation back to her somehow. Such as if I have a cold, it reminds her of her own cold, which is worse than mine, of course.

When she and my father flew out here after my medical traumatic incident, she admitted that she knew bringing my father was a bad idea. He could not stand not being the center of attention and he was used to my mother being laser-focused on him (for better and for worse). She said out loud that he would be jealous of her paying attention to me. It turned out that I didn’t need much help after all. I had a nurse’s aid who came every week to wash my hair. My mother helped me shower, but I could wash myself. She mostly dried me off. She also took care of Shadow for the first month or so, including feeding and cleaning his litterbox. And she did the cooking and the laundry. The former was pretty easy because we ordered Origin Meals, so it was mostly breakfast she had to prepare. By the second month, I had taken back the feeding of Shadow and started helping with the cooking. By the third month, I was doing everything for myself except the laundry (which I only did once a month or so, anyway, before my medical trauma). In other words, we didn’t really have to test the hypothesis of if my father would put up with my mother paying attention to me because I didn’t need it. In fact, I did more for my father than the other way around (and than my mother helped me because let’s be brutally honest, my father didn’t do jack shit for me).

I’ve written about this several times, but the thing that slapped me in the face with how unimportant I was to my parents was the second day I was home from the hospital. Two incidents that I’ll never forget. The first was my mother pressuring me to show my father a Taiji stretch for his back. I was still hopped up on drugs and tired as fuck, but that didn’t matter. My father’s back was more important than me. The stretch is really gentle and in normal times, it wouldn’t have been a problem at all. But, two weeks and two days after I had had walking pneumonia, two cardiac arrests, and a stroke? A much bigger deal. I tried to demur, but my mother would not take no for an answer. I was wiped out after doing it, but that didn’t matter at all.


The second incident was later that day when my father wanted me to Google something for him. I couldn’t read any fonts at that point, which was distressing me because I spend so much time reading and writing. If I couldn’t read fonts, well, my life would be drastically different. I told my father I couldn’t because I literally couldn’t read fonts. He got that stubborn mulish look on his face that he always gets when he hears something he doesn’t like and said, “Can’ you just look up one thing?” as if it was a question of me not doing it because I didn’t want to and not because I literally couldn’t do it. Although, I will point out that if I chose not to do it simply because I didn’t want to, that would have been valid as well. But the fact was that I couldn’t look it up for him. He stomped angrily to the dining room and knocked one of my meds on the floor. He didn’t bother picking it up, either.

That told me all I needed to know. Two days after I got home from the hospital–and, remember, I died twice and was brought back twice–and I could not be shown any grace by my parents. My physical health didn’t matter, not to mention my emotions. I knew all this before I ended up in the hospital, but it was never shown to me so starkly. One reason I keep repeating it is because my parents have a habit of forgetting or changing anything they don’t like about what happened. Anything that makes them look bad, to be more specific. And my brother has a tendency to forget negative things as well, so I have to remind myself that I’m not crazy. They DID do those things and I’m not just making it up.

That’s how I felt about my emotions all the time growing up. I felt as if there was something wrong with me and I felt horrible for having to continually tamp down my emotions since I was not allowed to have them. I was reading Slate’s Care and Feeding column and all the letters hit me hard to a certain extent. The first was from a mother who had a daughter who was extra-sensitive (or, in the more neutral parlance, highly sensitive) and was concerned how to teach her daughter to deal with it. The mom was not wrong that the world would see her daughter as overly sensitive, but that’s part of the problem. Sure, you can’t go around emoting at everyone all the time, but those emotions never go away. Or, they completely go away, which isn’t any better. Michelle nailed it when she said the daughter didn’t need to be taught that the world wouldn’t like her reactions because she could see that clearly enough. And helping her deal with it means giving her a safe space to feel those emotions. And helping her find a creative outlet for them. But trying to make her feel them less? Ain’t gonna work.

The second letter was from a grandmother who was convinced that her granddaughter was manipulating her (the latter) parents by having tantrums when her emotions ran high. The grandmother qualified that she was a preschool teacher and her granddaughter just needed a firm hand and consequences for her actions.  Which is what sensitive people are told all their lives. She called herself horrified, but I was pretty horrified at her callousness towards her granddaughter. There was no love there. There was no trying to understand. Oh, and the fact that the granddaughter didn’t do this at school (that she knew of, which, given her negative attitude towards her granddaughter, I would not be surprised if her daughter didn’t tell her (grandmother) everything) meant it was all fake. She was dismissive in saying all preschoolers had ‘big emotions’ (she disdained the term) and that with just some good old-fashioned discipline. her granddaughter would straighten up and fly right. Bullshit. What I learned from having parents who disapproved of my emotions was to hide them and to hide them well. I still had them, but I didn’t feel safe sharing them.

This is running long so I’ll get the other two letters (and they relate in a way) in a future post.

 

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